The Effect Of Sleep Deficiency On Information Processing And On The Cortical System

A good night’s sleep is vital to our physical and mental health and work.However,in life,people often voluntarily reduce sleep time due to work,study,lifestyle and other reasons.And because sleep deprivation has less impact on subjective sleepiness,people often underestimate its impact on cognition.In fact,in sleep studies,it has been consistently found that lack of sleep can reduce vigilance.However,in the field of sleep research,there are very few studies related to sleep pattern changes.Therefore,whether people can adapt to long-term sleep deprivation,and whether different levels of cognitive function and corresponding event-related potentials are sensitive to real-life sleep patterns,These issues still need us to explore.The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of long-term sleep deficiency on cognitive processing and electrophysiology such as continuous attention,inhibition control,and false detection in non-experimental manipulation.Participants who had a sleep time below 7 hours were classified into sleep restriction groups by participants’ self-reported average sleep time during the most recent month,and the others classified into healthy good sleeper group.The study was divided into two parts.Experiment 1 measured the behavioral data of psychomotor vigilance task and EEG signals in resting state.It was found that lack of sleep caused continuous attention to be impaired.Electrophysiological results showed that sleep deficiency only caused a small increase in whole cerebral θ energy.But combined with large-scale brain network,the sleep restriction group was found significant growth of θ power in the dorsal attention network(DAN)and visual network(VIS).In regression analysis with emotional factors as control variables,the results show that sleep time still can predict θ energy on the dorsal attention network.According to the hypothesis put forward by previous studies in sleep deprivation,the increase in θ energy may reflect local sleep intrusion,an increase in sleep tendency,and correspond to attention loss in behavioral level.And the dorsal attention network is mainly involved in the top-down directed attention process.This may indicate that sleep deficiency compromises the top-down directed attention process.Experiment 2 used the classic auditory stop signal task,because the stop signal task contained a variety of psychological processes.We are able to measure multiple levels of cognitive processing in one task.The results of the study found that in behavioral level,although Go reaction time and stop signal reaction time both increased in sleep restriction group compared with healthy good sleeper group,but the difference did not reach significant level.The results on the EEG signals are as follows.It is found that the early components under successful inhibition conditions and inhibition failure conditions,such as N2 and error-related negative waves(ERN),have no significant between-group differences;but later components under two conditions,such as P3,Error positivity(Pe)have significant differences.In conclusion,we found that sleep deficiency reduced the amplitude of the late components of event-related potentials(ERPs),which denote the top-down control processes.However,sleep deficiency has no effect on the early components of ERPs,suggesting that sleep deprivation has less effect on bottom-up processes.In summary,this study found that sleep deficiency has an impact on the physiological arousal of the dorsal attention network,and has different effects on different cognitive components.Specifically,the lack of sleep has a relatively large impact on cognitive functions that rely on will efforts or cognitive resources,but less on automated processing.