Decreased top-down attention modulation and compensatory recruitment of perception representation in vigilance...

Vigilance is crucial to daily life, but is highly vulnerable to sleep deprivation (SD). Although prior work attributes SD-related vigilance decline to impaired fronto-parietal function, how sleep loss alters the information-processing processes that support vigilant attention remains unclear. To address this gap, we linked single-trial event-related potentials (ERPs) to psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) performance using a linear mixed-effects model (LMM) across two sessions: normal sleep (NS) and 24-h SD. Forty-three participants completed the PVT in both sessions, with electroencephalography (EEG) recording. Results showed that vigilance performance deteriorated after SD, accompanied by delayed latencies of early ERP components and reduced amplitude of late components. Single-trial LMM analyses indicated that early ERPs predicted vigilance performance in both conditions, but with a delayed onset and stronger effect under SD. Critically, late attention-related ERPs only predicted vigilance in the NS condition, with no evident ERP-performance correlation after SD. These findings suggest that SD alters the information-processing pattern underlying vigilance-weakening top-down control and shifting reliance to earlier, stimulus-driven perceptual processing, which might serve as a partial compensation.