Sleep Deprivation and Vigilant Attention

Sleep deprivation severely compromises the ability of human beings to respond to stimuli in a timely fashion. These deficits have been attributed in large part to failures of vigilant attention, which many theorists believe forms the bedrock of the other more complex components of cognition. One of the leading paradigms used as an assay of vigilant attention is the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT), a high signal-load reaction-time test that is extremely sensitive to sleep deprivation. Over the last twenty years, four dominant findings have emerged from the use of this paradigm. First, sleep deprivation results in an overall slowing of responses. Second, sleep deprivation increases the propensity of individuals…