Poor sleep quality and a depressed mood are linked to a reduced likelihood of remembering a previously experienced event, said the study published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.
The researchers found strong associations between working memory and three health-related factors such as sleep, age and depressed mood.
Working memory is the part of short-term memory that temporarily stores and manages information required for cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehension.
Working memory is critically involved in many higher cognitive functions, including intelligence, creative problem-solving, language and action-planning. It plays a major role in how we process, use and remember information.
The study found that age is negatively related to the "qualitative" aspect of working memory -- that is, how strong or how accurate the memory is.
"Other researchers have already linked each of these factors separately to overall working memory function, but our work looked at how these factors are associated with memory quality and quantity - the first time this has been done," said Weiwei Zhang, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside in the US.
"All three factors are interrelated. For example, seniors are more likely to experience negative mood than younger adults. Poor sleep quality is also often associated with depressed mood", Zhang added.
The researchers performed two studies. In the first study, they sampled 110 college students for self-reported measures of sleep quality and depressed mood and their independent relationship to experimental measures of working memory.
In the second study, the researchers sampled 31 members of a community ranging in age from 21 to 77 years. In this study, the researchers investigated age and its relationship to working memory.
The researchers are the first to statistically isolate the effects of the three factors on working memory quantity and quality.
Although all three factors contribute to a common complaint about foggy memory, they seem to behave in different ways and may result from potentially independent mechanisms in the brain.
These findings could lead to future interventions and treatments to counteract the negative impacts of these factors on working memory.
For the findings, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the research team analysed self-reported sleep quality and quantity from teenagers and found that there was a significant relationship between poor sleep and mental health issues.
The study found that among the 4,790 participants, those who experienced depression reported both poor quality and quantity of sleep, while those with anxiety had poor quality of sleep only, compared to those teenagers who took part who didn't report anxiety or depression.
"This latest research is another piece of evidence to show that there is a significant link between sleep and mental health for teenagers," said study researcher Faith Orchard from the University of Reading in the UK.
This study highlights that those young people who have experienced depression and anxiety had overwhelmingly experienced poor sleep during their teens.
"What's noticeable is that the difference in the average amount of sleep between those who experienced depression, which amounts to going to sleep 30 minutes later each night compared to other participants," Orchard added.
Within the data, there were some participants who reported hugely worse quality and quantity of sleep, and the overall picture highlights that we need to take sleep much more into account when considering support for teenager wellbeing."
According to the study, teens were asked to self-report on sleep quality and quantity over a series of issues, and the researchers found that the control group of teenagers were on average getting around eight hours of sleep a night on school nights and a little over nine and half hours sleep on weekends.
Meanwhile, the group, which had a depressive diagnosis was getting less than seven and a half hours sleep on weeknights and just over nine hours sleep on weekends.
"The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adolescents aged between 14-17 years typically need around 8-10 hours of sleep each night," said study co-author Alice Gregory from Goldsmiths University in the UK.
"What is notable here is that the group with a diagnosis of depression most clearly fell outside of these recommendations during the week -- getting on average 7.25 hours of sleep on each school night," Gregory added.
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(IANS)