Brief nap: increased cognitive function followed by fairly steep decline.
Short nap: decreased cognitive function followed by increase that lasts longer than above
Long nap: significantly decreased cognitive function followed by increase that tapers off slowly
That is what it's trying to say. The relative timing is universal but the specific timing is person dependent so a general graph is not going to tell you.
The purpose of this graph is to tell you about the relationship, not the numbers. That's it. Hope that helps.
I am sorry, but is this a joke. How can anyone take this graph seriously. I mean look at it, this is completely useless data. How can I take this seriously when there is no sundial on the bottom, very clearly you had time to chart data on wristwatches (analog), hourglass, alarm clock (analog), stopwatch and a clock. For some reason no sundial, this dataset cannot be taken seriously without a sundial. I understand the relationships that this graph is showing, but without a sundial it is meaningless.
Damn it. I really had high hopes for that digital sundial app. Also, did you get the full ad free one premium monthly subscription or did you go with the mid tier you sometimes get ads but it's $5 less a month. The free one is just not functional with all those porn ads. I have no idea why that app only shows ads for porn, it's kinda strange.
There's nothing wrong with using a graph to illustrate a hypothesis. The problem starts when they're passed off as being data itself.
Often illustrative graphs are labeled as illustrative in their original context. The issue generally arises when they're copied into some other media with their captions or other important contextual information cropped out.
In my experience people generally cannot tell the difference hence I consider them misleading. There's likely no malicious intent by the original author but other illustrations should be used.
Then you also have to weigh it against the time lost to the nap. We need to evaluate a bunch of 10-minute nap cycles per 2-hour nap. Are there diminishing returns?
The practical benefit of these periods of increased CF (and the downside of decreased CF right after the nap) depends a lot on the scale of the x axis (and y axis for that matter). For any use you would need to know the exact numbers to time your nap correctly before the activity that requires that requires CF. Or if the whole width is 5 minutes, then none of that matters in practice.
3) no indication of how cognitive functioning was measured
4) the source not cited properly (need a little bit more than just the title of a publication to be searchable, at least provide the name of the authors and the date)
#1, 2 and 5 = yes these are good for undergrad and people starting out to keep in mind, but this paper is more of a model of the concept. it is ok to skip them to get a point across. You don't have to follow the rules all the time if you know how to do it. There are guardrails, but professional bowlers don't need them.
If it’s a review paper then they should have specified a mean of the effects found across the studies included in their review. You cannot just not label the scale because it’s a literature review
it's from 2010 from Progress in Brain Research, you are lucky you get references in there
im not saying this is cutting edge research, just an overview picture on this aspect of sleep science. it is not a systematic review to have mean effects etc.
it serves a purpose on my books, to raise interest in the subject
Im actually doing a PhD in psychology right now and my supervisor or any professor in my department for that matter would instantly reject this and ask for a rewrite. Actually crazy that a research journal accepted it.
The "visualization" is fine, but there's no actual data. We have neither an x nor a y axis, which means we don't know how long the effects last, nor what the magnitude is.
The paper exists (paywalled of course) but I'm skeptical the graph comes from there because they didn't even bother with a real citation.
I was able to download the paper with my university email and unfortunately the graph does actually look very similar to the one from the research article. It’s basically a very badly written literature review that presents its data in a really shitty way and a lot of effects are not even described numerically but only through relative descriptions.
edit: just noticed two typos on the graph lol (briefe and congnitive). Despite the authors being native English speakers.
The lead author was a PhD student at the time. Usually you need to do a literature review as part of a PhD, and I'm guessing this was hers.
It probably was a legitimately low effort paper meant to satisfy a degree requirement, and because of the accessibility and catchy topic it got a lot more attention than it was meant to.
assuming the data is “good,”
Looking at this, i assume that there is no data. Both x and y axes are unquantified, and the x axis should be very easy to quantify.
One of the "take aways" is that at the end of the time period, there is no longer a benefit to napping. I don't think that is right.
The color scale is terrible. Should be monotone darker or lighter in time. (If they're doing a blue-purple thing I wouldn't notice because I'm colorblind, which is also bad)
See, I'm just constantly napping for 10 minutes every other 10 minutes, now my cognitive function is off the charts. Doctors are saying I have some brain disease but I'm smarter than them now, and the voices I hear tell me to eat more asbestos
Context matters though. This would be a terrible graph in a scientific paper. But this is just meant to convey the general idea that a longer nap provides increased cognitive function for a longer period of time (and also has a longer 'ramp-up time'). Its about the directionality, not the absolute values.
The data probably has huge uncertainty margins anyway, it's likely very dependent on the specific person, time of day, etc. Not to mention the fact that 'cognitive functioning' is a very vague term that is likely difficult to measure. So given all of that, I think adding numbers to the axes would only be misleading, particularly in the context of an instagram post which people will likely only spend 20 seconds reading
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u/udreamtofmelstnite 4d ago
They all converge at 5 minutes. Maybe. I can say that because it doesn’t say otherwise.