Jul 28, 2014 12:24 PM EDT By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Lack of sleep has been linked to several health issues, but a new study found that it could also be a justice issue.

Researchers from the University of California-Irvine and Michigan State University found that sleep-deprived people are likely to create false memories - "a phenomenon in which people absorb incorrect information after an event and end up misremembering the incident," the Huffington Post reported.

"We already know that sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on your health and cognitive functioning," lead researcher Steven Frenda, who specializes in human memory, told the Huffington Post. "It seems another consequence may be that it makes our memories more easily manipulated and more pliable."

A preliminary study conducted by Frenda and colleagues suggested that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with the formation of false memories. The researchers then designed an experiment to investigate whether pulling an all-nighter would increase the likelihood of forming false memories.

For the study, researchers recruited more than 100 college-age participants and assigned them to one of four groups. Two groups were presented with a series of photos depicting a crime being committed as soon as they arrived to the lab - one group was then allowed to go to sleep, while the other group had to stay awake all night in the lab. The remaining two groups did things in the reverse order - they either slept or stayed awake all night and then viewed the crime photos in the morning.

In the second part of the experiment, the participants read narratives containing statements that contradicted what the photographs actually showed.

They found that people who viewed photographs of a crime being committed and then read false information about the photos were more likely to report remembering the false details in the photos than were those who got a full night's sleep.

The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications.

"Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise," Frenda said. "Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep."

The findings were recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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