Effects of sleep deprivation on executive functioning, cognitive abilities, metacognitive confidence, and decision making (original) (raw)
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Impaired decision making following 49 h of sleep deprivation
Journal of Sleep Research, 2006
Sleep deprivation reduces regional cerebral metabolism within the prefrontal cortex, the brain region most responsible for higher-order cognitive processes, including judgment and decision making. Accordingly, we hypothesized that two nights of sleep loss would impair decision making quality and lead to increased risk-taking behavior on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), which mimics real-world decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Thirty-four healthy participants completed the IGT at rested baseline and again following 49.5 h of sleep deprivation. At baseline, volunteers performed in a manner similar to that seen in most samples of healthy normal individuals, rapidly learning to avoid high-risk decks and selecting more frequently from advantageous lowrisk decks as the game progressed. After sleep loss, however, volunteers showed a strikingly different pattern of performance. Relative to rested baseline, sleep-deprived individuals tended to choose more frequently from risky decks as the game progressed, a pattern similar to, though less severe than, previously published reports of patients with lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Although risky decision making was not related to participant age when tested at rested baseline, age was negatively correlated with advantageous decision making on the IGT, when tested following sleep deprivation (i.e. older subjects made more risky choices). These findings suggest that cognitive functions known to be mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, including decision making under conditions of uncertainty, may be particularly vulnerable to sleep loss and that this vulnerability may become more pronounced with increased age.
Sleep Deprivation: Impact on Cognitive Performance
University of The People, 2023
This research paper was authored by Paula Alhola and Päivi Polo-Kantola, who investigated the impact of sleep disorders on a person's cognitive abilities, namely attention, working memory and decision-making. The study also explored the effects of partial sleep deprivation on cognition. Additionally, the research highlighted the recovery process from sleep deprivation, taking into account various factors such as gender, age, and social variables, which can influence the speed of recovery (Alhola & Polo-Kantola, 2007).
Sleep Deprivation and Decision Making-Whitney et al. The effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is not uniform. 1 In laboratory studies, sleep deprivation has consistently been shown to substantially degrade vigilance and sustained attention, whereas its effects on demanding tests of complex cognition such as decision making appear to be inconsistent and relatively small. 2,3 Paradoxically, in the natural environment there are well-documented deficits in decision making due to sleep deprivation. 4,5 In emergency response, disaster management, military encounters, and other fast-paced situations with uncertain outcomes and imperfect information, good decision making is significantly hampered by sleep deprivation. Although the lapses of sustained attention that are characteristic of sleep deprivation contribute to errors and accidents, 3,8 attentional lapses are not the whole story of sleep deprivation effects on naturalistic decision making. The laboratory tasks often used to examine sleep deprivation effects on decisions typically do not include elements of updating information over Study Objectives: To better understand the sometimes catastrophic effects of sleep loss on naturalistic decision making, we investigated effects of sleep deprivation on decision making in a reversal learning paradigm requiring acquisition and updating of information based on outcome feedback. Design: Subjects were randomized to a sleep deprivation or control condition, with performance testing at baseline, after 2 nights of total sleep deprivation (or rested control), and following 2 nights of recovery sleep. Subjects performed a decision task involving initial learning of go and no go response sets followed by unannounced reversal of contingencies, requiring use of outcome feedback for decisions. A working memory scanning task and psychomotor vigilance test were also administered. Setting: Six consecutive days and nights in a controlled laboratory environment with continuous behavioral monitoring. Subjects: Twenty-six subjects (22-40 y of age; 10 women). Interventions: Thirteen subjects were randomized to a 62-h total sleep deprivation condition; the others were controls. Results: Unlike controls, sleep deprived subjects had difficulty with initial learning of go and no go stimuli sets and had profound impairment adapting to reversal. Skin conductance responses to outcome feedback were diminished, indicating blunted affective reactions to feedback accompanying sleep deprivation. Working memory scanning performance was not significantly affected by sleep deprivation. And although sleep deprived subjects showed expected attentional lapses, these could not account for impairments in reversal learning decision making. Conclusions: Sleep deprivation is particularly problematic for decision making involving uncertainty and unexpected change. Blunted reactions to feedback while sleep deprived underlie failures to adapt to uncertainty and changing contingencies. Thus, an error may register, but with diminished effect because of reduced affective valence of the feedback or because the feedback is not cognitively bound with the choice. This has important implications for understanding and managing sleep loss-induced cognitive impairment in emergency response, disaster management, military operations, and other dynamic real-world settings with uncertain outcomes and imperfect information.
A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Short-Term Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Variables
Psychological Bulletin, 2010
A substantial amount of research has been conducted in an effort to understand the impact of short-term (Ͻ48 hr) total sleep deprivation (SD) on outcomes in various cognitive domains. Despite this wealth of information, there has been disagreement on how these data should be interpreted, arising in part because the relative magnitude of effect sizes in these domains is not known. To address this question, we conducted a meta-analysis to discover the effects of short-term SD on both speed and accuracy measures in 6 cognitive categories: simple attention, complex attention, working memory, processing speed, short-term memory, and reasoning. Seventy articles containing 147 cognitive tests were found that met inclusion criteria for this study. Effect sizes ranged from small and nonsignificant (reasoning accuracy: g ϭ Ϫ0.125, 95% CI [Ϫ0.27, 0.02]) to large (lapses in simple attention: g ϭ Ϫ0.776, 95% CI [Ϫ0.96, Ϫ0.60], p Ͻ .001). Across cognitive domains, significant differences were observed for both speed and accuracy; however, there were no differences between speed and accuracy measures within each cognitive domain. Of several moderators tested, only time awake was a significant predictor of between-studies variability, and only for accuracy measures, suggesting that heterogeneity in test characteristics may account for a significant amount of the remaining between-studies variance. The theoretical implications of these findings for the study of SD and cognition are discussed.
Less effective executive functioning after one night's sleep deprivation
Journal of Sleep Research, 2005
SUMMAR Y The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is affected negatively by sleep deprivation (SD) and executive functioning is largely dependent on activity in the PFC. Earlier studies have focused on subsystems of executive functioning, and tests of executive functioning have shown both low reliability and low validity. In the present study, 11 healthy volunteers were sleep deprived and compared with 11 healthy controls in a study on effects of one night's SD on integrative executive functioning. Following SD, the performance of subjects on an ecologically valid test, the modified Six Elements Test, was significantly impaired. There were no group differences on psychomotor vigilance, verbal or visuospatial working memory. This extends previous knowledge of performance effects of SD, and may be of special importance for individuals with cognitive work tasks.
Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 2009
Young adult male students participated in a naturalistic, group-design experiment to ascertain the effects of one night's total sleep deprivation (TSD) on performance of diverse executive function tasks presented as an extended, multi-task battery. On the majority of component tasks in this battery, performance has been reported to be impaired following one night's TSD when tasks are administered in isolation. However, subjects sleep deprived 35-39 hours showed few performance deficits among tests in this battery when compared with non sleep-deprived controls. Sleepdeprived subjects showed only poorer recognition memory and overconfidence in incorrect temporal judgments. Behavioral and physiological adaptation to chronically sleep-restricting lifestyles may confer resistance to the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation in high-functioning young adults.
Biology of Sport
One night of sleep deprivation INTRODUCTION Sleep loss affects motor and cognitive performance, the immune system, and emotional and physical well-being [1, 2]. From an epistemological point of view, sleep loss may play a role in the increased prevalence of diabetes and/or obesity [3]. Sleep deprivation increases homeostatic sleep drive and degrades waking neurobehavioral functions, as reflected in sleepiness (the condition of being in a drowsy state due to lack of sleep) and impaired attention, cognitive speed and memory [4]. However, other researchers have shown that performance of complex cognitive tasks may not be impacted by disrupted sleep as severely as that of simple cognitive tasks [5, 6]. Sleepiness differs from fatigue, which is characterized by a decline in performance capacity during physical work and depends on both central and peripheral mechanisms [7, 8]. Prolonged and/or intense stimulation of the central nervous system may produce conscious awareness of fatigue, which contributes to cognitive and emotional disturbances [9, 10] and a reduced ability to activate muscles [11]. A previous study concluded that the psychomotor vigilance test of simple reaction time (RT) is a reliable outcome metric for
Effects of sleep deprivation on dissociated components of executive functioning
Sleep, 2010
We studied the effects of sleep deprivation on executive functions using a task battery which included a modified Sternberg task, a probed recall task, and a phonemic verbal fluency task. These tasks were selected because they allow dissociation of some important executive processes from non-executive components of cognition. Subjects were randomized to a total sleep deprivation condition or a control condition. Performance on the executive functions task battery was assessed at baseline, after 51 h of total sleep deprivation (or no sleep deprivation in the control group), and following 2 nights of recovery sleep, at fixed time of day (11:00). Performance was also measured repeatedly throughout the experiment on a control task battery, for which the effects of total sleep deprivation had been documented in previously published studies. Six consecutive days and nights in a controlled laboratory environment with continuous behavioral monitoring. Twenty-three healthy adults (age range ...
Differential effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance
2017
The study examines the question whether individual vulnerability to effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive and psychomotor performance is related to personality traits. 46 participants stayed for 13 days in DLR’s sleep laboratory AMSAN. Sleep was restricted totally or partly every three nights. The level of performance was monitored in three-hour intervals with a cognitive test battery. Most participants showed the strongest performance decrements after 26 and 32 hours of sleep deprivation. Especially for tests of sustained attention, calculated change scores were negatively related to extraversion as measured by the Freiburger Personality Inventory. The findings confirm parts of Eysenck’s theory of personality that introverts due to their higher cortical arousal level need less external stimulation to perform.