# The impact of insufficient sleep on the serial reproduction of information

## TL;DR

Not getting enough sleep leads to worse story retelling, but emotional engagement can help reduce this effect.

## Contribution

This study shows that insufficient sleep impairs story transmission, with emotional engagement mitigating the negative impact.

## Key findings

- Story content decayed more when retold by sleep-restricted individuals.
- Emotionally engaged participants showed less story detail loss during sleep restriction.
- The first reteller in a chain had the most significant impact on story fidelity.

## Abstract

Story retelling is an important form of communication, cultural practice, and message transmission. Insufficient sleep is known to affect relevant cognitive skill areas necessary for story retelling or transmission fidelity. We conducted a preregistered randomized cross-over study on n = 155 young adults with exogenously assigned nightly sleep levels experienced in their at-home environments. A serial story reproduction task was administered online, and chains of up to three retells of a given story involved varied numbers of sleep restricted (SR) versus well-rested (WR) retellers. While story content decayed with each retell, group-level analysis showed that additional SR retellers in a chain was associated with greater decay, which mostly resulted from the introduction of an initial SR reteller at the first retell. Supporting the group-level effect, individual-level analysis confirmed that the number of details and the story’s key event were significantly less preserved during a participant’s SR treatment week. Exploratory analysis showed an attenuation of this effect in those reporting a higher level of affective response (interest or surprise) in the story. This suggests that emotional engagement can combat the deleterious effects of SR on successful story retelling, and perhaps on other types of content recollection.