DECREASED ATTENTIONAL RESPONSIVITY DURING SLEEP-DEPRIVATION - ORIENTING RESPONSE LATENCY, AMPLITUDE, AND HABITUATION

Ever increasing societal demands for uninterrupted work are causing un paralleled amounts of sleep deprivation among workers. Sleep deprivati on has been linked to safety problems ranging from medical misdiagnosi s to industrial and vehicular accidents. Microsleeps (very brief intru sions of sleep into wakefulness) are usually cited as the cause of the performance decrements during sleep deprivation. Changes in a more ba sic physiological phenomenon, attentional shift, were hypothesized to be additional factors in performance declines. The current study exami ned the effects of 36 hours of sleep deprivation on the electrodermal- orienting response (OR), a measure of attentional shift or capture. Su bjects were 71 male undergraduate students, who were divided into slee p deprivation and control (non-sleep deprivation) groups. The expected negative effects of sleep deprivation on performance were noted in in creased reaction times and increased variability in the sleep-deprived group on attention-demanding cognitive tasks. OR latency was found to be significantly delayed after sleep deprivation, OR amplitude was si gnificantly decreased, and habituation of the OR was significantly fas ter during sleep deprivation. These findings indicate impaired attenti on, the first revealing slowed shift of attention to novel stimuli, th e second indicating decreased attentional allocation to stimuli, and t he third revealing more rapid loss of attention to repeated stimuli. T hese phenomena may be factors in the impaired cognitive performance se en during sleep deprivation.