Sleep Deprivation Effects on Cognitive Flexibility in Dynamic Decision-Making Environments
Abstract
Sleep loss is common in military operations, and this is problematic and dangerous as sleep loss causes significant deficits in operational performance. In particular, situational awareness (the ability to identify, process, and comprehend essential information about what is happening with regard to the mission) and decision making are degraded when military personnel do not get enough sleep. There is currently no effective method to protect against these adverse effects of sleep loss on operational performance. To understand how sleep loss affects performance, we must consider both vigilant attention (the ability to stay focused on a task) and dynamic attentional control (the ability to shift attention to another task or update task-relevant information when needed). This project is concerned in particular with deficits in dynamic attentional control due to sleep loss, which contribute to critical impairments in operational performance, such as decreased ability to use the outcomes of previously made decisions to guide future decisions. Deficits in dynamic attentional control depend on the pacing of the task and on how much information must be held in memory while performing the task. Pacing and information load are factors that are associated with shifting of attentional control between proactive control (anticipation of upcoming events) and reactive control (retrieval of prior information). The changes in attentional control due to sleep loss thus lead to loss of situational awareness and poor decision making in fast-paced, dynamically changing circumstances such as military encounters. In the context of the Fiscal Year 2015 Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Topic Area of Sleep Disorders, we seek to provide a foundation for the development of a training program that will address this issue by improving the cognitive flexibility of military personnel. In a laboratory-based study, healthy young adults will be assigned to a sleep deprivation condition or to a control condition. The subjects will be tested on performance tasks while well-rested and after 38 hours of sleep deprivation. Some of the performance tasks will measure vigilant attention, some will measure attentional control, and some will measure situational awareness and decision making relevant to real-world operational performance. The subjects will experience task conditions with rapid pacing or increased memory load in order to simulate high operational tempo or high situational complexity in military missions. We will demonstrate that failures of situational awareness and decision making are produced by deficits in attentional control. We will also show that rapid pacing and increased memory load cause people to shift attentional control from proactive control to reactive control. This makes them vulnerable to perseverative errors (continuing to perform the same action even though it does not have the desired effect) under rapidly changing circumstances such as those often encountered in military missions. Thus, strategies to mitigate failures of situational awareness and decision making should focus on restoring attentional control. Therefore, as part of this research project, we will also develop a method to protect against failures of situational awareness and decision making resulting from sleep loss. This method will involve training to improve cognitive flexibility. Our objective is to show that cognitive flexibility training will help people to recover performance more quickly following unexpected changes of circumstances. By developing this novel method to increase military resilience against operational performance impairment, our project will help to improve the safety and success of US military missions around the globe. The research also has the potential to benefit the millions of Americans who are frequently deprived of sleep due to sleep disorders, other medical conditions, or work circumstances and profession
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 31, 2017
- Source ID
- W81XWH1610319
Entities
People
- Hans Van Dongen
Organizations
- United States Army
- Washington State University