Sleep and Cognition Lab
Who are we?
The Sleep and Cognition Lab, lead by Professor Michael Chee, is a multidisciplinary research team that is dedicated to improving human cognitive performance, health and wellbeing.
Why do we care about naps?
We live in a part of the world where mid-afternoon napping used to be a regular feature of life. In line with how accelerated economic development has changed lives over the last 2-3 decades, nocturnal sleep has been curtailed significantly and late sleeping is a big problem in East Asia. After spending several years researching the negative cognitive effects of a night of total sleep deprivation, we launched into several studies looking at practically implementable strategies to improve human cognition through improving sleep.
Over the past several years, we have systematically examined how naps may be used to supplement inadequate sleep at night, including a study titrating nap doses to examine the most beneficial amount of time to nap. In our studies, we have examined outcomes such as vigilance, mood, sleepiness, memory, including topographical memory and hierarchical knowledge structures. Visit our publication page for a full list of our nap studies.
Recently, we have moved from performing proof-of-concept small-sample experiments to examine sleep and naps over longer periods of time (several months to a year!) in samples of hundreds of individuals that come from all walks of life. Read more about the tools we use to do this here.
Our hope is that through our work, we will be able to offer more tailored advice on how naps can be used to benefit health, productivity and wellbeing.
What else do we care about?
Visit our microsites to find out more.
Need for Sleep is a series of sleep research camps (quasi-experimental design) for teens in Singapore to investigate the relationships between restricted sleep, health and cognitive outcomes in adolescents.
The NUHS Residents study was initiated as a collaboration between The National University Health System (NUHS) in Singapore and the Sleep and Cognition Laboratory to to understand the impact of physicians' overnight call schedules, their challenges and how schedules can be optimised for cognition, health and well-being.
NUS 1000 Staff Edition Study is a year-long study conducted in staff employed at the National University of Singapore to understand how time spent on work, family and social responsibilities influence sleep, mental health, and wellbeing.