Psychiatry

Pattern Separation and Sleep (current project)

The objective of this project which is a collaboration with the Universitary Psychiatric Clinics in Basel (UPK) is to elucidate the connection between sleep disorders and pattern separation. We compare patients with a wide array of sleeping disorders, such as depression, anxiety and psychosocial stress, to healthy subjects and determine their sleep quality and intensity. Additionally, we also determine their ability for pattern separation by using psychometric tests (e.g. the "Behavioral Pattern Separation: Object task"). We then compare the intensity of sleep deprivation in participants with their respective results of the pattern separation task and explore how different the findings are in sleep deprived participants compared to participants without sleep disturbances.
The relationship between sleep deprivation and pattern separation abilities could lead to additional information concerning memory processing in different psychological illnesses, such as depression, anxiety and stress disorders.