The effect of total sleep deprivation on working memory: evidence from diffusion model

Working memory is crucial in human daily life and is vulnerable to sleep loss. The current study investigated the impact of sleep deprivation on working memory from the information processing perspective, to explore whether sleep deprivation affects the working memory via impairing information manipulation.

Thirty-seven healthy adults attended two counterbalanced protocols: a normal sleep night and a total sleep deprivation (TSD). The N-back and the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) assessed working memory and sustained attention. Response time distribution and drift-diffusion model analyses were applied to explore cognitive process alterations.

TSD increased the loading effect of accuracy, but not the loading effect of response time in the N-back task. TSD reduced the speed of information accumulation, increased the variability of the speed of accumulation, and elevated the decision threshold only in 1-back task. Moreover, the slow responses of PVT and N-back were severely impaired after TSD, mainly due to increased information accumulation variability.

The present study provides a new perspective to investigate behavioral performance by using response time distribution and drift-diffusion models, revealing that sleep deprivation affected multicognitive processes underlying working memory, especially information accumulation processes.