Ultradian rhythms AO3

• strength - research to support that dreaming occurs during REM sleep - Dement and Kleitman monitored sleep patterns of 9 pps with an EEG. REM activity highly correlated with experience of dreaming, brain activity varied depending on how vivid the dreams were - provides objective evidence - however only done on 9 people
• weakness - individual differences in humans - Tucker et al found differences in pp's in terms of the duration of each stage. the study was in a laboratory so it was purely biological differences between patients - differences are likely to be biologically determined
• strength - measure sleep in a lab setting - extraneous variables like noise that could impact sleep are controlled - findings are reliable as research can be replicated - however, studies of sleep involve being attached to machinery, leading to pp's sleeping in a way that doesn't represent their ordinary sleep patterns
• strength - improved understanding of age related changes in sleep - sleep scientists observed that slow wave sleep reduces with age, growth hormone is mostly produced during SWS therefore is deficient in older people - resulting sleep deficit explains various impairments in old age such as reduced alertness, to increase SWS relaxation and medication - knowledge of ultradian rhythms has practical value
• strength - use EEG's that have good temporal resolution compared to an fMRI. can accurately detect brain activity at resolution of a millisecond - results provided have real world usefulness and high validity - on the other hand, EEG has poor spatial resolution, therefore doesn't allow researchers to pinpoint the exact source of neural activity