Sleep deprivation disrupts error awareness and subsequent behavioural regulation

Sleep deprivation is known to impair cognitive performance, yet its effects on error awareness and subsequent behavioural adjustments remain incompletely understood. Here, we investigated how sleep loss affects the use of subjective performance evaluation to guide post-error adaptations.

Thirty healthy adults completed a novel, gamified error awareness multi-rule Simon task once while well rested and once after one night of total sleep deprivation. On each trial, participants reported both their task response and subjective evaluation of response accuracy. This design allowed us to dissociate objective performance from subjective error awareness and to examine their influence on subsequent behaviour over time.

Sleep deprivation slowed responses, reduced accuracy, increased missed responses, and decreased the proportion of consciously detected errors, with impairments increasing over time on task. Both objective errors and subjective error judgements were associated with subsequent slowing. When well rested, subjective-error-associated slowing exceeded objective-error-associated slowing. This difference was reduced under sleep deprivation. Specifically, objectively correct responses judged as errors were followed by slowing relative to correctly judged correct responses, and this slowing was attenuated under sleep deprivation. Accuracy showed post-error decreases that were most pronounced following objective errors.

Together, the findings indicate that sleep deprivation reduces error awareness and is associated with altered post-error behavioural regulation.