Resilience to Sleep Loss and Stress: A Framework for Investigation and Intervention
Abstract
Sleep loss is common in military operations. This is problematic and dangerous as sleep loss causes significant deficits in operational performance. In particular, sleep loss degrades situational awareness (the ability to identify, process, and comprehend essential information about what is happening with regard to the mission). In addition, sleep loss impairs decision-making, especially in cases where decisions must be made rapidly and in the face of changing circumstances. There is currently no effective method to protect against these adverse effects of sleep loss on operational performance. Even less attention has been paid to how effects of sleep loss combine with the effects of acute stress, something that frequently accompanies military missions. To understand how sleep loss and stress affect performance, we must consider vigilant attention (the ability to stay focused on a task), working memory (the ability to maintain goals and strategies in the focus of attention), and dynamic attentional control (the ability to shift attention to another task or update task-relevant information when needed). This project is concerned with how both sleep deprivation and acute stress affect these three classes of mental processes. Our previous research has shown that sleep deprivation impairs both vigilance and cognitive flexibility, while other research has shown that stress enhances vigilance but degrades working memory. The changes that sleep loss and stress produce can be expected to lead to loss of situational awareness and poor decision-making in fast-paced, dynamically changing circumstances such as military operations. In the context of the Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Topic Area of Sleep Disorders, we seek to provide a foundation for the development of interventions that can mitigate both sleep deprivation- and stress-induced cognitive performance impairments. In a laboratory-based study, healthy young adults will be assigned to a sleep deprivation condition or to a well-rested control condition, with half of the subjects in each of these conditions receiving a well-established intervention that produces short-term stress, and the other half performing a non-stressful control activity. The subjects will be tested on performance tasks twice: while well-rested and after approximately 30 hours of sleep deprivation (or control). 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-word operational performance. The subjects will experience task conditions with rapid pacing or increased working memory load, in order to simulate high operational tempo or high situational complexity in military missions. We will demonstrate what mental abilities are affected by sleep deprivation and stress separately and how their effects combine to degrade decision-making in settings where risks must be evaluated and re-evaluated as circumstances change. We expect that the combined impact of sleep loss and stress will make subjects especially vulnerable to perseverative errors (continuing to perform the same action even though it does not have the desired effect) and that the combined factors will increase inappropriate risk-taking. Thus, our research will be able to guide the development of targeted mitigation strategies to prevent the most common kinds of decision errors observed in stressful and sustained military operations.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 10, 2021
- Source ID
- W81XWH2010442
Entities
People
- Hans Van Dongen
Organizations
- United States Army
- Washington State University