Auditory Discrimination during Rem and Non-Rem Sleep in Women before and after Delivery

Abstract

Pregnant and postpartum women were presented with auditory stimuli, of from 10 to 70 decibels, of baby's cries, a woman's voice saying “baby is crying” and a speech noise during stage 2, stage REM and slow-wave stages of sleep. The subjects were awakened with increasing difficulty in the above-given order of stages, and with increasing facility going from speech noise to human voice to baby's cry, in that order. There was an overall lowering of awakening threshold after delivery. All the differences found were statistically significant, except that the difference between the voice saying “baby is crying” and the tape-recorded baby's cry was not significant.

The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.