The effects of sleep deprivation on performance over a 48-hour period.

Abstract

This document kes bee. opproved for public release May 1969Ond sale; its distribution is unlimited. Prepared for:Office. ProblemMilitary equipment capable of operating for 48 hours oe longer is now being developed.When t'is equipment becomes available, military personnel will be able to participate in sustained rvmbat for longer periods of time than has ever before been possible. While technological advances will eiable this equipment to perform reliably over extended time periods, little is known about the effects of sustained combat on the personnel who will operate the equipment. If they re unable to maintain a satisfactory level of performance, then the new equpment will not be able to function at its maximum potential. New training programs will need to be developed, or changes in military doctrine will be necessary.A review of the psychological literature and military records pertaining to prolonged performance was conducted at the request of the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command Armor Agency. The review yielded little information about men's ability to perform for 48 hours or longer, and the information that was available often contained contradictions.In order to obtain more reliable information on sustained performance, a research program was developed to determine how performing for 48 hours without sleep would affect the efficiency of the work produced. Also studied were the effects of starting to perform in the morning compared to starting in the evening, and the effects of job rotation when it provides no additional rest time. ApproachThe subjects were 142 enlisted men trained in armor who were assigned to one of fourexperimental conditions. In three of these conditions, subjects worked for 48 hours with a 15-minute break after every 1% hours of work and a one-hour meal break every six hours, but with no additional time provided for sleeping., Subjects in the fourth (control) condition performed according to the same schedule except during the night hours, when they were allowed to sleep.Subjects were assigned to two-man teams. One member of each team tracked a continuously winding road on a driving simulator; the other member worked on a target detection task-attempting to detect brief, infrequent light signals preser-ted on a large screen. In two of the four experimental conditions, the subjects remained at the same task throughout the experiment; in the other two conditions, they rotated jobs after each 11/2 -hour period. In three conditions, the experiment began in the evening; in the fourth, it began in the morning., By comparing the performance scores of subjects in different pairs of conditions, the effects of sleep deprivation, starting time, and job rotation on performance were determined. ResultsSubjects who worked for 48 hours without time allotted for sleep performed significantly worse on the driving task than the control subjects, who were allowed to sleep from 0200 to 0700 each night., The difference in the performances of the two groups on the target detection task approached st...

Napping and human functioning during prolonged work

“…An earlier laboratory study of a simulated driving task by the same research agency (19) had shown significant deterioration in driving performance after 48 hours without sleep.…”

The Effects of Fatigue and Alcohol on Highway Safety

“…Sleep deprivation (hours without sleep) has been found to impair detection performance on visual (Wilkinson, 1960) and auditory (Deaton, Tobias & Wilkinson, 1971) vigilance tasks, target detection tasks (Drucker, Cannon and Ware, 1969), visual search patterns (Kaluger & Smith, 1970), information processing tasks (Bugge, Opstad & Magnus, 1979), five-choice serial reaction time (RT) tasks (Wilkinson, 1961), tracking performance (Drucker, Cannon & Ware, 1969), and vehicle control use measures (Forbes et al, 1958).…”

“…Drucker, Cannon and Ware (1969) examined performance on a target detection task over 48 hours. Sleep deprived subjects performed worse than subjects who were allowed to sleep.…”

“…Drucker, Cannon, and Ware (1969) examined tracking a continuously winding road on a driving simulator over 48 hours with and without sleep deprivation. The sleep-deprived group performed significantly worse overall than the control group.…”

Fatigue Stressors in Simulated Long-Duration Flight. Effects on Performance, Information Processing, Subjective Fatigue, and Physiological Cost

“…Three subjects, kept awake 90 hr, reportedly did not show any remarkable performance decrements until about the 72nd hour, at which V time they began falling into involuntary micro-sleep periods after which their performance wild immediately improve. Still, many early studies on sleep deprivation failed to find significant performance decline, until a minimum of 36 hr of sleep deprivation, and often a maximum [60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72] In 1937, Warren and Clark (208) used addition and subtraction and colornaming tests (similar to those of Bills) to measure blo:ks, latency, and accuracy during 65 hr of sleep deprivation. Blocking was found to increase greatly after a period of prolonged sleeplessness, but the usually employed measures of error scores and RT showed no relationship to sleep loss.…”