Comparison of sustained attention assessed by auditory and visual psychomotor vigilance tasks prior to and during sleep deprivation

Abstract

To date, no detailed examination of the pattern of change in reaction time performance for different sensory modalities has been conducted across the circadian cycle during sleep deprivation. Therefore, we compared sustained auditory and visual attention performance during 40h of sleep deprivation assessing multiple metrics of auditory and visual psychomotor vigilance tasks (PVT). Forty healthy participants (14 women) aged 30.8±8.6years were studied. Subjects were scheduled for an ∼8h sleep schedule at home prior to three-six laboratory baseline days with an 8 h sleep schedule followed by 40h sleep deprivation. Visual and auditory PVTs were 10min in duration, and were administered every 2h during sleep deprivation. Data were analysed with mixed-model anova. Sleep deprivation and circadian phase increased response time, lapses, anticipations, standard deviation of response times and time on task decrements for visual and auditory PVTs. In general, auditory vigilance was faster and less variable than visual vigilance, with larger differences between auditory and visual PVT during sleep deprivation versus baseline. Failures to respond to stimuli within 10s were four times more likely to occur to visual versus auditory stimuli. Our findings highlight that lapses during sleep deprivation are more than just long responses due to eye closure or visual distraction. Furthermore, our findings imply that the general pattern of change in attention during sleep deprivation (e.g. circadian variation, response slowing, lapsing and anticipations, time on task decrements and state instability) is similar among sensory-motor behavioral response modalities.

Figure 1

Reaction times, standard deviation of reaction time, and anticipation performance for visual (PVT-10V) and auditory (PVT-10A) tasks every 2 hours across 40h of total sleep deprivation. All data are represented as hourly deviation from each subjects mean with the overall group mean added back to every hour for each metric. The box filled with diagonal lines between hours awake 16 and 24 represents the habitual sleep episode. Error bars represent SEM.

Figure 2

Lapse performance for visual and auditory PVT every 2 hours across 40h of total sleep deprivation. The box filled with diagonal lines between hours awake 16 and 24 represents the habitual night. Error bars represent SEM.

Figure 3

Time on task decrements for the mean auditory and visual reaction time PVT performance at 2 and 26 hours awake. Error bars represent SEM. *denotes significant differences between 2h and 26h awake for the reciprocal mean transformed data (P < 0.01125 with modified Bonferroni correction). Differences for min 1 and 3 for the PVT-10A were P>0.01125 but P< 0.05.