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. 2023 Mar 9;46(3):zsac305.
doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsac305.

Wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep improves episodic learning and alertness

Viviana Greco  1 , Damiana Bergamo  2 , Paola Cuoccio  3 , Karen R Konkoly  4 , Kike Muñoz Lombardo  1 , Penelope A Lewis  1
Affiliations

Wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep improves episodic learning and alertness

Viviana Greco et al. Sleep. .

Abstract

Ambient light can influence sleep structure and timing. We explored how wearing an eye mask to block light during overnight sleep impacts memory and alertness, changes that could benefit everyday tasks like studying or driving. In Experiment 1, ninety-four 18-35-year-olds wore an eye mask while they slept every night for a week and underwent a control condition in which light was not blocked for another week. Five habituation nights were followed by a cognitive battery on the sixth and seventh days. This revealed superior episodic encoding and an improvement on alertness when using the mask. In Experiment 2, thirty-five 18-35-year-olds used a wearable device to monitor sleep with and without the mask. This replicated the encoding benefit and showed that it was predicted by time spent in slow-wave sleep. Our findings suggest that wearing an eye mask during overnight sleep can improve episodic encoding and alertness the next day.

Keywords: alertness; episodic memory; eye mask; learning; sleep.

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Figures

Graphical Abstract
Graphical Abstract
Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Experimental procedure. (A) Experiment 1 consisted of 2 consecutive weeks in which, in a counterbalanced order, ambient light was blocked with an eye mask during sleep for 1 week, or not blocked with a control mask for the other week. Night 1–Night 5: participants slept at home wearing a mask (eye mask or control). Day 6–Day 7: participants performed the PAL, the PVT, and the MSL task. (B) Experiment 2 consisted of 5 days, 2 habituation nights, and 2 experimental days. For the entire study duration, participants slept with an eye mask or a control mask (counterbalanced order) together with the DH. In the morning of Days 4 and 5, participants completed the PAL and the PVT.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Behavioral results. Boxplots for (A) learning performance on the PAL, (B) reaction times on PVT, and (C) number of correctly tapped sequences on the MSL task. Mean +/− standard errors of the mean are indicated. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
(A) Experiment 2. PAL results (N = 28). Boxplots for learning performance on the PAL after a night of sleep wearing the eye mask or the control mask. (B) Combined results of the encoding performance on the PAL from Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 112). **p < .01; *p < .05. (C) Significant Spearman’s (rank) correlation between the time spent in SWS (minutes) and the learning performance on the word pairs after a night wearing the eye mask. Note that when N = 3 outliers were removed, the correlation was still significant (rs = 0.44, p = .04). (D) Spearman’s (rank) correlation between time spent in SWS (minutes) and learning performance on the word pairs after a night wearing the control mask.
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