November 3 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Tenure Talk Seminar Series
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026 at 11:00am
The seminar will be In-Person.
Eitan Schechtman, PhD
Assistant Professor, Neurobiology & Behavior, UC Irvine
Sleep and cognition: mechanisms, interventions, and real-life implications
Abstract:
Sleep supports a multitude of cognitive and affective processes. In this talk, I will present work from our lab demonstrating the real-life effects of sleep loss on cognition, examining the neural mechanisms through which sleep supports cognitive and affective processes, and testing sleep-based interventions to improve memory and mental well-being. The talk will focus on three cognitive-affective domains: memory, emotional processing, and decision making. Within the domain of memory, we used naturalistic designs to examine how the inherently interconnected nature of memories affects consolidation during sleep, revealing critical boundary conditions and exposing the effects of memory reactivation on neural representations. Within the domain of affective processing, we demonstrated that the activity patterns of affective neural networks during sleep reflect depression symptoms, suggesting that depression is linked with maladaptive processing during sleep. In a separate study focusing on post-traumatic stress, we used a sleep-based intervention to alleviate intrusive thoughts following exposure to distressing content. Finally, we used a large-N, fully naturalistic design to demonstrate the hazardous real-life impacts of modest sleep loss on daily decision-making. These lines of research converge to demonstrate the critical importance of sleep for cognition and the potential of sleep-based interventions for improving cognitive performance and mental well-being.