The Effect Of Sleep Deprivation On Bistable Perception And Its Neural Mechanism

Previous studies have shown that sleep deprivation impairs various high levels of cognitive function,including attention,memory and decision making,and the neural mechanisms behind this impairment remain an open scientific question.This research adopts the bistable perceptual phenomenon,using Binocular Rivalry paradigm and Structure from Motion paradigm,through functional magnetic resonance(f MRI)technology and Bayesian computational modeling,comprehensively inspects the effects of sleep deprivation on bistable perceptual processing and its neural mechanisms,and then further explore on the impact of sleep deprivation on a variety of cognitive function in general mechanism.In experiment 1,the behavior of sleep-deprived individuals on binocular rivalry tasks was investigated.The results showed that subjects in the sleep-deprived state exhibited slower perceptual switching and a longer duration of mixed perception than subjects in the normal state of sleep.This suggests that sleep deprivation does disrupt the basic bistable perceptual inference process.In experiment 2,we investigated the neural mechanism of sleep-deprived individuals on binocular rivalry tasks.The results showed that sleep deprivation attenuated the activation of frontoparietal cortex,especially in the right intraparietal sulcus(r IPS),who is considered to be the core brain region of bistable perception,which suggesting that sleep deprivation leads to the slowing down of bistable perceptual switching by weakening the activation of the intraparietal sulcus.In the Bayesian model analysis,the computational mechanism of sleep deprived individuals on binocular rivalry tasks was investigated.Results show that Compared to individuals who sleep normally,individuals who were sleep deprived showed a smaller prediction error(PE)and a larger prior expectation.These results suggest that sleep deprivation disrupts the brain’s predictive coding system,leading individuals to underestimate prediction errors and over-rely on prior expectations for perceptual decision-making,which may also be the general mechanism by which sleep deprivation damages various cognitive functions.In experiment 3,the behavior and computational mechanisms of sleepdeprived individuals on structural from motion tasks were investigated.The results of behavioral data show that sleep deprivation slows down perceptual switching and prolongs the duration of dominant perception.The results of computational modeling show that the sleep deprivation subjects exhibit a smaller prediction error and a larger prior expectation.Both behavioral results and computational modeling results are repeated the results of experiment 1,indicating that the effects of sleep deprivation on bistable perception are not task-specific.Through the above three experiments,this study found that sleep deprivation disrupts the brain’s predictive coding system by weakening the activation of the frontal-parietal network,further leading to abnormal performance in the process of bistable perception.This impairment of the individual predictive coding system may be a general mechanism for the effects of sleep deprivation on a variety of complex cognitive functions.