Sleep deprivation and compensatory cognitive effort on a visual information processing task

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) is often associated with worse performance on tasks of attention and working memory, but some studies show no performance changes. One possibility is that greater compensatory cognitive effort is put forth to achieve similar results after TSD. We aimed to better understand the relationship between TSD, cognitive engagement, and performance outcomes following TSD.

Twenty healthy adults completed cognitive testing following a night of normal sleep and again after ~55 hours of TSD. Participants detected target letters in low (3-item) and high (10-item) load visual letter displays on the span of apprehension task with concurrent pupillometry, a measure of cognitive effort.

We found significantly poorer detection accuracy and marginally longer response times following TSD across both arrays. In both arrays, significantly greater preparatory pupillary responses were found just prior to array onset. There was also a significant session by array interaction for pupillary responses, such that significantly greater dilation was found for the 3-letter array after TSD, while a nonsignificant decline in dilation was found following the 10-letter array after TSD.

These results suggest a complex relationship between attentional control and cognitive resource allocation following TSD. Sleep-deprived individuals may allocate more compensatory cognitive effort to easier tasks but choose to disengage from more challenging cognitive tasks that have little perceived reward or probability of success to preserve diminishing cognitive resources. More work is needed to better delineate the underlying neurological systems involved in these processing load-dependent attentional control mechanisms after TSD.