Experiment on Serial Diverse Imagining Sleep Technique Will Be Presented at SLEEP-2016

CogSci Apps Corp. is pleased to report that the results of a recent test of the serial diverse imagining technique (used by mySleepButton) will be presented at the joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, SLEEP-2016 Conference in Denver, CO. (June 14, 2016 at 2:00 PM).

Beaudoin, L. P., Digdon, N., O’Neill, K. & Racour, G. (Abstract accepted for 2016 publication). Serial diverse imagining task: A new remedy for bedtime complaints of worrying and other sleep-disruptive mental activity. Poster to be presented at SLEEP 2016 (A joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society). Denver, CO.

This experiment which had 154 participants, used SomnoTest, a research version of mySleepButton. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:

Introduction: A racing mind, worries, and uncontrollable thoughts are common bedtime complaints among poor sleepers. Beaudoin created a Serial Diverse Imagining task (SDIT) that can be used at bedtime to divert attention away from sleep interfering thoughts. [CogSci Apps’] app randomly presents recordings of relatively concrete words one at a time with an 8-second interval between recordings during which the person creates and maintains a mental image of the word until the next recording prompts the next image and so on. Our study is an experimental test of SDIT compared to the standard treatment of Structured Problem-solving (SP) and to the combination of both treatments. A key feature of SP is that it must be done earlier than bedtime and requires about 15 minutes to do it. SDIT, which is done at bedtime, does not have those constraints.

Despite using an outdated corpus of items to imagine, which has since been optimized for the general public as well as for students, the results were encouraging.

Professors Digdon and Beaudoin intend to publish one or two full-length papers on the theory, technique and results.

The theory that inspired CogSci Apps Corp. to publish mySleepButton has many more implications than can be examined in one study. We encourage scholars to run additional experiments on this study. We look forward to the conference and continued research on this framework. They may contact CogSci Apps Corp. for access to SomnoTest.

The publication referenced above is available in Simon Fraser University’s Summit open access repository.