Impairment of Attentional Networks after 1 Night of Sleep Deprivation

Abstract

Here, we assessed the effects of sleep deprivation (SD) on brain activation and performance to a parametric visual attention task. Fourteen healthy subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging of ball-tracking tasks with graded levels of difficulty during rested wakefulness (RW) and after 1 night of SD. Self-reports of sleepiness were significantly higher and cognitive performance significantly lower for all levels of difficulty for SD than for RW. For both the RW and the SD sessions, task difficulty was associated with activation in parietal cortex and with deactivation in visual and insular cortices and cingulate gyrus but this pattern of activation/deactivation was significantly lower for SD than for RW. In addition, thalamic activation was higher for SD than for RW, and task difficulty was associated with increases in thalamic activation for the RW but not the SD condition. This suggests that thalamic resources, which under RW conditions are used to process increasingly complex tasks, are being used to maintain alertness with increasing levels of fatigue during SD. Thalamic activation was also inversely correlated with parietal and prefrontal activation. Thus, the thalamic hyperactivation during SD could underlie the reduced activation in parietal and blunted deactivation in cingulate cortices, impairing the attentional networks that are essential for accurate visuospatial attention performance.

Sleep Deprivation Is Associated with Attenuated Parametric Valuation and Control Signals in the Midbrain during Value-Based Decision Making

“…Chosen value signals in the vmPFC showed a similar attenuation. Reduced lateral and medial parietal cortex responses are frequently observed after SD (Chee and Choo, 2004;Choo et al, 2005;Chee et al, 2006;Lim et al, 2007;Tomasi et al, 2009), and our results extend these observations to parametric value representations. Overall task-related responses (i.e., without parametric modulation) recruited a similar neural system, including the ventral visual stream, lateral PFC, and ACC.…”

Sleep Deprivation Biases the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Economic Preferences

“…2 A, B) and right thalamus (supplemental Table 2, available at www.jneurosci.org as supplemental material). SD-related reduction of task-related parietal cortex activation has been extensively reported (Bell-McGinty et al, 2004;Chee and Chuah, 2007;Tomasi et al, 2009) and is not discussed further in this article.…”

“…Several functional neuroimaging studies have revealed how short-term sleep deprivation (SD) can negatively affect attention Tomasi et al, 2009), working memory (Chee and Choo, 2004;Habeck et al, 2004;Mu et al, 2005), and learning (Drummond et al, 2005;Sterpenich et al, 2009). Yet, it remains unclear whether and how SD shapes the very preferences that guide decision making, independently of these more general effects on cognition.…”

Increased sleep pressure reduces resting state functional connectivity

“…Even after a single night of partial SD (PSD), alterations of basic attention and more complex cognitive processes can be detected [34,35]. Mostly, these effects are compensable and transient; still, severe cognitive and emotional disturbances may occur if sleep deprivation exceeds a certain limit or persists chronically [36].…”