Impaired dynamic visual attention in patients with insomnia

Insomnia is one of the most common sleep disorders and is associated with several cognitive deficits. Some field and semi-ecological studies reported that patients with insomnia have a higher risk of driving accidents, suggesting their impaired abilities in visual attentive tracking. In this study, we employed a multiple object tracking task (MOT) to objectively assess the impairment of visual attentive tracking abilities in participants with insomnia (N = 30) by comparing their tracking accuracies to those of healthy control participants (N = 30). The similarities between target and distractor sets, the color complexity of target set, and the color complexity of distractor set were manipulated as independent variables. The results showed that the insomnia group performed worse than the healthy control group, but the effects of three independent variables on tracking performance were similar between two groups. These findings suggested that patients with insomnia suffer from poor attention capacities but their abilities to ignore distractors that differ from targets remain effective. Therefore, the current study provides a new approach to assessing attention deficits and exploring cognitive mechanisms underlying impaired driving abilities in patients with insomnia.