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Sleep influences cognitive performance in lemurs

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Abstract

Primates spend almost half their lives asleep, yet little is known about how sleep influences their waking cognition. We hypothesized that diurnal and cathemeral lemurs differ in their need for consistent, non-segmented sleep for next-day cognitive function—including long-term memory consolidation, self-control, foraging efficiency, and sociality. Specifically, we expected that strictly diurnal Propithecus is more reliant on uninterrupted sleep for cognitive performance, as compared to four other lemur species that are more flexibly active (i.e., cathemeral). We experimentally inhibited sleep and tested next-day performance in 30 individuals of 5 lemur species over 960 total nights at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina. Each set of pair-housed lemurs experienced a sleep restriction and/or deprivation protocol and was subsequently tested in a variety of fitness-relevant cognitive tasks. Within-subject comparisons of performance on these tasks were made by switching the pair from the experimental sleep inhibited condition to a normal sleep environment, thus ensuring cognitive equivalency among individuals. We validated effectiveness of the protocol via actigraphy and infrared videography. Our results suggest that ‘normal’ non-disrupted sleep improved memory consolidation for all lemurs. Additionally, on nights of normal sleep, diurnal lemurs performed better in foraging efficiency tasks than cathemeral lemurs. Social behaviors changed in species-specific ways after exposure to experimental conditions, and self-control was not significantly linked with sleep condition. Based on these findings, the links between sleep, learning, and memory consolidation appear to be evolutionarily conserved in primates.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the staff at the Duke Lemur Center and offer thanks to Erin Ehmke and David Brewer for continuous support through all aspects of this research. We thank Emilie Melvin, Amanda Lee, Jack Grady, Alex Antezana, James Yu, and Sean Basile for countless volunteer hours. This research was supported by Duke University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada

    David R. Samson

  2. Animal Behavior Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, USA

    Alexander Vining

  3. Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Charles L. Nunn

  4. Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, USA

    David R. Samson & Charles L. Nunn

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  1. David R. Samson
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Correspondence to David R. Samson.

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All applicable international, national, and institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. All procedures performed in the study involving animals were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted.

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Samson, D.R., Vining, A. & Nunn, C.L. Sleep influences cognitive performance in lemurs. Anim Cogn 22, 697–706 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-019-01266-1

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