Abstraction of social and emotional gist during sleep in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Annette Conzelmann, Ph.D.; Dr. Hong-Viet Ngo; Professor Dr. Alexander Prehn-Kristensen
• Subject Area: Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468645090

This project uses two neurodevelopmental disorders, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which are hallmarked by a deviant processing of stimuli in the social and emotional domains, respectively. The project follows the idea that the deviant stimulus processing in these disorders is (i) partly due to an impaired abstraction of domain-specific memory information during sleep, and (ii) that these impairments in information abstraction can be linked to specific alterations in sleep-microarchitecture. We address these questions by comparing the effects of post-encoding sleep and wakefulness on the abstraction of gist-like memory for neutral, social and emotional stimuli. We hypothesize that ASD patients show deficits in abstracting memory information especially in social interactions which may be linked to an altered phase locking of sleep spindles to slow oscillation up-states during NonREM sleep. ADHD patients are expected to display altered emotional gist abstraction during sleep, possibly linked to altered EEG theta activity during REM sleep. (iii) Finally, to ensure causality, we will manipulate the disorder-specific sleep features underlying impaired abstraction of social and emotional memory, using domain specific targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during NonREM sleep in ASD and auditory stimulation of REM sleep EEG theta activity in ADHD.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5434: Information Abstraction During Sleep
• International Connection: United Kingdom