Effects of sleep deprivation on executive functioning, cognitive abilities, metacognitive confidence, and decision making

Abstract

Performance on many decision-making tasks is underpinned by metacognitive monitoring, cognitive abilities, and executive functioning. Fatigue-inducing conditions, such as sleep loss, compromise these factors, leading to decline in decision performance. Using a 40-hr sleep deprivation protocol, we examined these factors and the resulting decision performance. Thirteen Australian Army male volunteers (aged 20-30 years) were tested at multiple time points on psychomotor vigilance, inhibitory control, task switching, working memory, short-term memory, fluid intelligence, and decision accuracy and confidence in a medical diagnosis-making test. Assessment took place in the morning and night over two consecutive days, during which participants were kept awake. Consistent with previous work, cognitive performance declined after a night without sleep.Extending previous findings, self-regulation and self-monitoring suffered significantly greater declines immediately after the sleepless night. These results indicate that the known decline in complex decision-making performance under fatigue-inducing conditions might be facilitated by metacognitive rather than cognitive mechanisms.

Caffeine may disrupt the impact of real-time drowsiness on cognitive performance: a double-blind, placebo-controlled small-sample study

“…The magnitude of this dissociation appeared to depend on task complexity, with caffeine significantly reducing the impact of momentary fluctuations of drowsiness on executive performance in the Go-NoGo task, while producing similar but weaker trends in the PRT and SRT tasks. This is consistent with previous findings showing performance on simple tasks, such as the PVT, to be highly sensitive to sleep loss, while more complex tasks such as response inhibition and decision making tend to be less affected 23 , 29 , 30 . Similarly, caffeine has been shown to improve response speed in the PVT task to a greater extent than its more complex aspect—lapses 37 in a 77-h TSD.…”

The sleep and circadian problems of Huntington’s disease: when, why and their importance

“…In the other arm, sleep impairment appears to exacerbate neurodegeneration. Sleep deprivation leads to cognitive deficits in domains including executive function, attention and processing speed, as well as affective disturbances such as impulsivity and emotional lability [16][17][18][19][20]. Sleep abnormalities hence almost certainly contribute to such features common in neurodegenerative conditions.…”

The Treatment of Sleep Dysfunction in Neurodegenerative Disorders

“…Moreover, mounting recent evidence contends that sleep dysfunction contributes to the severity and progression of neurodegeneration [15]. On a symptomatic level, it is wellestablished that sleep deprivation and disruption leads to deficits in attention, executive function, and processing speed, as well as promoting impulsivity, emotional lability, and depression [16][17][18][19][20]. Sleep abnormalities therefore almost certainly contribute to the burden of such features common to neurodegenerative conditions.…”