Hi Christian,

I did some research on sleep depviation and circadian effects on human cognitive performance, and I would like to send you our published work on this subject. Although many tasks have been taken as a measure of sleep deprivation, most of the complex tasks are subject to procedural learning or some kind of repeated-testing effect. Since it is difficult to prevent practice and testing effects, I would keep with a simple reaction-time (RT) task (or an easy two-choice RT task), which is quite robust against repeated-testing effects, varying critical experimental parameters such as temporal uncertainty (i.e., response-stimulus interval, or foreperiod interval) and response mode (manual, pedal, eye-movement responses). By this means you can adjust the parameters according to your research goals.

As a reading, I recommend the work of Robert Wilkinson and colleagues, for example, Wilkinson (1990). I have attached a paper which is extremely informative but (for reasons I will never understand) hardly overlooked by the community. In this work, the effects of several parameters of response-stimulus interval were compared in sleep-deprivation situations. I have also worked on this subject, but my work on temporal uncertainty is rather aimed at testing concurrent theories of response timing, but the main effects provide a clear-cut message: When using exactly the same two-choice RT task (across 5 experiments), performance becomes more severely affected with temporal uncertainty. RT depends on both contextual temporal uncertainty (the spacing of a set of foreperiods within a particular experiment) and sequential timing effects (RT in short foreperiod trials is slower when preceded by a long foreperiod, i.e., in a long-short foreperiod sequence). Note also that the reliabilities improve with greater temporal uncertainty. I did not concentrate on reliabilties but I since assessment researchers do, I will note this here). The chronometric variables may provide sensitive indicators of cognitive fatigue which hopefully could be also of some use for your research goals.

Some references on fatigue and sleep deprivation effects

Langner, R., & Eickhoff, S. B. (2013). Sustaining Attention to Simple Tasks: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Neural Mechanisms of Vigilant Attention. Psychological Bulletin, 139(4), 870-900. doi: 10.1037/a0030694

Bratzke, D., Rolke, B., Steinborn, M. B., & Ulrich, R. (2009). The effect of 40 h constant wakefulness on task-switching efficiency. Journal of Sleep Research, 18(2), 167-172.

Bratzke, D., Steinborn, M. B., Rolke, B., & Ulrich, R. (2012). Effects of Sleep Loss and Circadian Rhythm on Executive Inhibitory Control in the Stroop and Simon Tasks. Chronobiology International, 29(1), 55-61.

Steinborn, M. B., Bratzke, D., Rolke, B., Gordijn, M. C. M., Beersma, D. G. M., & Ulrich, R. (2010). The Effect of 40 Hours of Constant Wakefulness on Number Comparison Performance. Chronobiology International, 27(4), 807-825.

Wilkinson, R. (1990). Response–stimulus interval in choice serial reaction time: Interaction with sleep deprivation, choice, and practice. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42(2), 401-423.

Some references on temporal uncertainty effects

Los, S. A., & Van den Heuvel, C. E. (2001). Intentional and unintentional contributions to nonspecific preparation during reaction time foreperiods. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 27(2), 370-386.

Steinborn, M. B., & Langner, R. (2012). Arousal modulates temporal preparation under increased time uncertainty: Evidence from higher-order sequential foreperiod effects. Acta Psychologica, 139(1), 65-76.

Vallesi, A., Lozano, V. N., & Correa, A. (2013). Dissociating temporal preparation processes as a function of the inter-trial interval duration. Cognition, 127(1), 22-30. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.11.011

Best regards,

Micha

--

Dr. Michael B. Steinborn

Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

Psychologie III, Angewandte Kognition & Methoden

Röntgenring 11, Raum H07

97070 Würzburg

Email: [email protected]

Tel. +49-931-30-81725

www.michaelsteinborn.de

Hi Micha, thanks for the input. I will need some time to go through your material, but I already see that the information is relevant and your remarks inspiring. cheers, Christian

Check out this paper, and other papers on the effects of sleep disorders and CPAP on cognitive performance by Sonia Ancoli-Israel and her research group.

Sustained use of CPAP slows deterioration of cognition, sleep, and mood in patients with Alzheimer's disease and obstructive sleep apnea: a preliminary study.

Cooke JR, Ayalon L, Palmer BW, Loredo JS, Corey-Bloom J, Natarajan L, Liu L, Ancoli-Israel S.

J Clin Sleep Med. 2009 Aug 15;5(4):305-9.

PMID:

19968005

[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Free PMC Article

Related citations

The classic Van Dongen 2003 paper in sleep shows performance on a variety of cognitive tasks in response to both total sleep deprivation and chronic sleep restriction over a period of two weeks. This should give you a sense of different types of tasks used (They used the PVT but also a plethora of other tasks, too).

There are several cognitive domains influenced by sleep loss, the trick is figuring out what your hypotheses are and what domains you want to focus on. Certainly lapses and other measures of sustained attention are impaired by sleep loss. This work is very thoroughly investigated in the classic Williams 1959 Lapse hypothesis paper. But they also examine another very prominent impairment following sleep loss: errors of commission. This can be assessed in a PVT like task, but that is probably less sensitive than a go/no-go paradigm or a stop signal task. Selective attention is also impaired, and you could use a flanker-type task or a visual search type task to capture those impairments as well. Memory encoding and consolidation are other domains impaired by sleep loss. The trick for consolidation is making sure the sleep loss happens after memory encoding. There are also other domains relevant for emotional and reward processing that are impacted by sleep loss. Killgore has a great article on the impact of sleep loss on performance on the Iowa gambling task, and Jim Horne has some interesting articles on divergent thinking. I also can't forget all the work on working memory. There is a lot of work on that from groups like Mike Chee's group. There really is a wide swath of literature on the cognitive deficits of sleep loss, and many of them are sensitive. As Michael so rightly puts above, many of these tasks have issues with learning curves and repeat-test effects. If you used any of them, you would need to think about how you would implement them. It really comes down to what your hypothesis is. That can lead you to cognitive domain-specific testing, or ecologically valid testing, or cognitive testing of specific brain regions or networks. Hope this helps!

We've been assessing the cognitive effects of fatigue for decades. You might want to read the three chapters in Part III, "Assessment of Fatigue," in Matthews & Desmond (ed.) , "The Handbook of Operator Fatigue," Ashgate, 2012. Wilkinson's work on the USRT and the later development of the PVT are summarized in my chapter 2, "An Historical View of Operator Fatigue."

Thanks for the great sugestions. I believe I have some really good leads now and I am impressed by the width of the field - which should not be surprising, given the relevance of sleep to health, well-being, and efficiency.

Dear Bryce, I was reading your suggestions with great interest. Meanwhile I also worked through Schmidt et al 2007, who gives a great overview on the impaired cognitive faculties. I think that I would like to assess several basic cognitive factors for effects of sleep deprivation - seemingly deprivation effects can vary dependent on the cognitive function in question and I would like to get a good picture of what happens in several relevant domains, currently sustained and selective attention. I like the idea of selective attention assessment by the use of a flanker task, that is distractors. I wonder if there is work on PVT and using distractors (there is, but not very controlled: Anderson et al.2006)?

Regarding the PVT -- This is just Robert Wilkinson's unalerted simple reaction time (USRT) task in solid-state hardware. Simple reaction time has been used as a primary task in many studies of mental fatigue, often as one task in the ANAM task battery. Simple reaction time has also been used as a secondary task in workload studies as a way to measure spare mental capacity allowed by performance of the primary task. If you search for driving studies that use the driving simulator, STISIM, you will find that some of the studies use the simulator's embedded two-choice simple reaction time task (turn signal task) during driving. Those data may be helpful to you.

You might want to search for studies in which a computerized analog of the USRT was used as part of a divided attention task. You might also want to search for reports on NovaScan, which was/is an industrial application of a divided attention task (Robert O'Donnell, Samuel Moise, Douglas Eddy). There was a USRT task that was available in NovaScan.

There has been good work done in Japan by Prof Hirohiko Kuratsune on this topic, see e.g., World Journal of Neuroscience, Vol.2 No.2(2012), "Changes in reaction time, coefficient of variance of reaction time, and autonomic nerve function in the mental fatigue state caused by long-term computerized Kraepelin test workload in healthy volunteers", by Kuratsune et al.

This describes a way to use a mental computation task to both induce mental fatigue and to have some assessment of the impact on performance as fatigue increases. This might give you some different ideas beyond PVT for the task at hand ..

Thanks Conor, I think this paper is relevant and presents a nice workload paradigm to manipulate mental fatigue. For my purpose, testing the cognitive effects of sleep-related fatigue it is too long, though it might be interesting to look at the effect of sleep deprivation on the effects of time-on-task-related fatigue.

Christian -- if you were to decide to use heart rate variability, please contact me. I'm doing two government projects in which I am reducing and analyzing HRV responses to stress.

What an interesting discussion. I found the question problematic with regards to the initial statement “Fatigue, especially induced by sleep deprivation, leads to cognitive deficits”.

Performance impairment due to sleep loss is difficult to quantify for several reasons. At the start the clear distinction between fatigue and sleepiness is vital. The pathogenesis of either of these constructs is expected to be different for short-term or long-term sleep deprivation; it will also depend on the cause of sleep deprivation. To elaborate, in sleep deprivation due to obstructive sleep apnea, the repeated arousals associated with resumption of respiration at the end of respiratory episodes results in significant impairment not only of function (i.e. performance), but also structure (i.e. neuronal impairment) due to chronic repetitive tissue deoxygenation. Likewise, prolonged sleep deprivation is linked to significant adverse effects, such as mental health illnesses, which also affects cognition. Therefore, if we assume that sleep deprivation is chronic, and you wish to measure its effect on cognition, it is intuitively appropriate to study markers of physiological processes (through function of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, autonomic nervous system response, metabolic processes, etc).

In case you’re interest lies in studying physiologic fatigue (i.e. short-term sleep deprivation, pre-, post-sleep), the psychomotor vigilance test has been used in field studies and reported to be ported to personal digital assistance. I also recall seeing studies utilizing metrics derived from job performance (i.e. observed attentional failures, driving errors, medical errors committed, performance of military tasks training, etc.)

Hope this adds to the discussion. Kind regards,

Tatyana

Dear Tatyana, your point adds indeed to the discussion. You mention the long-term consequences of sleep deprivation, which surely are interesting. I indeed am more interested in the short-term deprivation - in terms of hours, maybe days - but I nevertheless see merit in the assessment of physiological processes to quantify short-term sleep deprivation effects and to predict from the iompairment of these processes to the cognitive impairment. You mention the activity of the HPA axis (involved in stress responses?) and other neurophysiological/metabolic markers. I wonder how to use physiological measurements to assess the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, that is to compare an individuals values to that of a (healthy) norm population. Using cognitive assessment batteries (PVT, etc..) allows for the orientation on population norms/standards of (good) cognitive ability, as far as I know. Physiological markers, however, have the problem of interpersonal variability which *seems* much greater than that observed for cognitive tests (though I believe that mean reaction time in the PVT is also subject-specific and therefore a problematic interindividual variability exists). At least I know that individual response profiles are a core problem in physiological computing and related communities. Maybe I am wrong there, but I would like to hear what you think. Are there ideas about how to create individual models for cognitive capabilities derived from behavioral and/or physiological response profiles to assess the individual impact of (short- or long-term) sleep deprivation? I think such individual models would be needed and I believe that they are harder to create when you look at physiological markers.

Btw. the term fatigue, as I understand and use it, refers to the same concept as sleepiness, but is used in the operation research domain. Probably there are more "shades" to it, which can be qualified by additional specification of the reason of the fatigue (e.g. time-on-task, short- or long-term sleep deprivation). Is there a distinction between fatigue and sleepiness for you?

Hello Christian,

Thank you for the clarification.

I will start from the end. Yes, there is a difference between sleepiness and fatigue. Sleepiness is a basic physiological state. Its presence and severity can be determined by the readiness of sleep onset, the ease with which its interrupted, and the duration of sleep. Sleepiness is the endpoint of time awake, time of day (relevant to circadian rhythms), and is influenced by clinical conditions (i.e. quality of sleep due to various medical and primary sleep disorders, medication effects, etc.). Fatigue is recognized when performance of an activity results in diminished capacity for carrying out a function. In the case of physiological fatigue, the clinical community defines this as the state of tiredness due to physical or mental exertion, and can be ameliorated by rest, not necessarily sleep. The factors influencing fatigue also include time awake, time of day (relevant to circadian rhythms), and task itself (intensity, complexity, etc.).

I believe that sleepiness is more of a homeostatic state (i.e. global state of consciousness), not related to performance or task complexity, whereas fatigue is more a neurophysiological substrate, impacted by motivation, cognitive capacity, etc.

The difference between sleepiness and fatigue becomes clear when tests to measure both were applied. Many studies have reported only mild to moderate correlation between these constructs. In fact, the fatigue construct was more strongly and negatively correlated with alertness, which is expected given the discussion above.

I agree that physiological markers would be subject to great interpersonal variability, as every individual is different in their sensitivity to sleep loss. A few studies support this: in a group of healthy young persons some people were more resistant to the effect of sleep deprivation than others - the trend was independent of prior sleep history. Possible explanations may include the differences in the basal level of alertness, the amount of sleep needed (i.e. genetically predisposed), as well as ability of the brain itself to adjust to an altered sleep-wake pattern. The individual models may be relevant (i.e. baseline assessment test for effect of sleep deprivation on individual - to select the most resilient persons) in certain occupations. An interesting review was published by Aston-Jones in Sleep Medicine – Brain structures and receptors involved in alertness (2005; S3-S7).

I wouldn't be of much help in how to go about measuring the effect of fatigue as I've never done so myself. If I come across any work that would be of use, I will let you know.

Kind regards

Thanks Tatyana, I have found a quite thorough article on the differentiation between sleepiness and fatigue - which you described quite concisely.

Differentiation of sleepiness and mental fatigue effects. by Balkin, Thomas J.; Wesensten, Nancy J. - In Ackerman, Phillip L. (Ed), (2011). Cognitive fatigue: Multidisciplinary perspectives on current research and future applications

Hi Christian,

Thanks for bringing up your initial question. Although there are many papers that describe the effects of sleep loss on various cognitive functions, there exist fewer works that explicitly compare and assess the abilities of various performance measuring tasks in reliably and accurately quantifying the effects on specific cognitive functions. I feel, the problem, however, is in determining an accurate "definition" of a particular cognitive function.

Balkin et al.'s (2004) paper (Comparative utility of instruments for monitoring sleepiness-related performance decrements in the operational environment) compares the sensitivity to sleep loss of various cognitive functions assessed via different tasks; but, doesn't explicitly answer your question.

On a different note, with regards to developing individual-specific models of performance/physiologic markers, you may find some insights in these papers:

PVT Performance:

1) An Improved Methodology for Individualized Performance Prediction of Sleep-Deprived Individuals with the Two-Process Model. Rajaraman et al. (2009)

2) Individualized performance prediction during total sleep deprivation_Accounting for trait vulnerability to sleep loss. Ramakrishnan et al. (2012)

Cortisol:

A Phenomenological Model for Circadian and Sleep Allostatic Modulation of Plasma Cortisol Concentration. Thorsley et al. (2012)

Hope these help.

Regards,

Sridhar

Thanks Sridhar, I found the first reference already very helpful! I also find your work on the PVT very interesting. Would you agree that the PVT is the most useful test for the assessment of sleepiness? Would you prefer a test battery to judge the complex effects on cognitive function to a single measure? Can the PVT response impairment be brocken down into more basic cognitive functions, such as perceptual and motoric?

I found this theoretical review by Jackson et al. 2012 very inspiring: Deconstructing and reconstructing cognitive performance in sleep deprivation

Best, Christian

Hi Christian,

Yes, PVT is definitely the most useful and practically viable test to assess effects of sleep loss on vigilance. To assess effects on other cognitive functions, I'd rely on a test battery.

Recently, there have been efforts into breaking down the PVT reaction times into decision (perceptual) and non-decision (motoric) components (look up Ratcliff's diffusion model, 2002 and Patnaik et al., J Sleep Res, 2014). However, I don't have much insight into how useful and reliable these are.

Thanks for referring the Jackson paper. Gread read, indeed. I think that paper too mentions about the diffusion modeling approach.

Regards,

Sridhar

Hi Christian,

Given that your affiliation to an aviation / aerospace, you may be familiar with Fatigue Risk Management Systems.

Most of the posts here relate to psychological experiments. While I work in this area, I've found that human factors specialists and industrially oriented persons are more interested in developing measures that can be used as tools to determine suitability for work or its continuation when workers are exposed to shift work, long hours or both. For your convenience I've attached an article you might find helpful if you have an industrial orientation.

As regards more mechanistic considerations, meta-analyses or reviews are always a good place to start looking. David Dinges group publishes a systematic review every one or two years and I've attached the 2013 edition for reference

As Bryce Mander has kindly pointed out, my lab has contributed several behavioural and functional imaging studies examining the various ways in which a night of total sleep deprivation can affect behaviour. You can look up these papers at: http://www.cogneuro-lab.org

Briefly we have studied the effects of TSD on working memory, visual short term memory, peripheral processing capacity, distractor inhibition, maximal rate of visual picture processing, selective attention, preparatory attention, risky decision making, impulsivity and effort discounting.

In addition we have made several explorations into the neuroimaging correlates of inter-individual differences in vulnerability to sleep deprivation. One of these papers is attached for your reference.

Finally, if you are interested in predicting risk of performance decline, one poster recommended Patnaik JSR 2014. That work also came from our lab and is attached as well.

You can find most of these papers from the lab website or from my RG page.

Good luck.

Article Lapsing when sleep deprived: Neural activation characteristi...

Article Sleep Deprivation and Neurobehavioral Dynamics

Article Look before you (s)leep: Evaluating the use of fatigue detec...

Article Predicting vulnerability to sleep deprivation using diffusio...

Remember that the PVT (1) is not a classic "vigilance" test because it has no background events and thus a signal probability of 1, and (2) is a solid-state version of the Wilkinson un-alerted simple reaction time task (USRT). Thus, while the PVT is good at characterizing the effects of fatigue and sleep loss on simple RT, in terms of lapses, it does not have anything to do with other issues such as decision-making, risk taking, divided attention, classic vigilance, and other cognitive functions that appear to be impaired by fatigue.

Dear All,

I came across work published by William McDougall in 1909, titled “The conditions of fatigue in the nervous system”. I would recommend it to everyone; it truly enhanced my understanding of the topic.

Kind regards,

Tatyana

I must say that at the start, I wasn't very taken in by the PVT but over the years, I've found it a very robust marker of performance decline. As I stated in a previous post, how you want to think about a test or a battery of tests depends on whether you are an operational person or a theoretician.

An operational person wants to know when it is within reasonable risk to drive, operate machinery etc. Here one does not need to know how the test works, just as long as the correlation between the measure and the outcome of interest is high and high within contexts that are encountered in the operational envelope.

If you want to look at theory and mechanisms, then that's a different matter. Some of us make a living breaking down tasks into component processes and formulating theories about how the brain works but every model has strengths and weaknesses. The ontology of cognitive processes remains debated but its hard to go wrong by speaking of of attention, memory, executive function, language and affective processing.

Going back to the PVT, it has been validated in multiple civilian and military settings and presently a 3 minute version has been implemented See: Psychomotor Vigilance Performance: Neurocognitive Assay Sensitive to Sleep Loss

JILLIAN DORRIAN, NAOMI L. ROGERS, AND DAVID F.DINGES. Its a book chapter available on the U Penn website.

Its not such a dumb test as one might think. Change the distribution of inter stimulus intervals and you get different results.... More if folks are interested.

Mike

Fatigue on cognitive abilities mean a punctuation to think and action which is normally exhibited for Stimulus- Response. It may require an introspective narration for remedy seeking person.

Thanks Michael, I found your papers a great source of information. I am indeed interested in the assessment of cognitive abilities in an applied context, but consider that a long-term goal. First, I would like to use the opportunity to learn more about the effects of sleep deprivation on different cognitive capabilities.

Basically, I assume that for each scenario one wants to assess fatigue-related cognitive impairment in, specific (relevant) indicators have to be found, since the scenarios might differ in the cognitive abilities required. PVT is able to measure sustained attention, which is a relevant cognitive ability in many tasks, and therefore it is indeed a valuable instrument to measure the effects of fatigue on exactely this ability. However, I wonder if it is also able to predict the impairment in other cognitive capabilities, for example selective attention or working memory, or if there is the need to have a test battery which assesses the cognitive capabilities in question directly?

You mention that the PVT results can be manipulated by the change of inter stimulus interval distributions. Is there a specific cognitive faculty that can be tested by doing so?

Kind regards,

Christian

Quite a bit of this material was covered in 'The Handbook of Operator Fatigue,' Matthews et al. (ed.), Asgate, 2012.

Thanks James, I already had a look at some chapters (Van Dongen, your historical overview). It indeed gathers many relevant articles. I will definitely try to get a copy of the whole book!

==> regarding Michael Chee's/Christian's contribution: "...changing the interstimulus/foreperiod intervals in simple-reaction time tasks..."

Hi Christian,

since the PVT is essentially a simple-RT task, timing intervals might be subject to experimental manipulation. There is a current debate about the mechanism involved in these effects, and several competing theoretical explanations have been offered. Of course, these debates have little to do with sleep deprivation but with response timing mechanism (temporal preparation), but they are might open new ways of theorizing in the context of sleep deprivation. One prominent model is based on a process of supervisory attentional monitoring to expect target arrival (Vallesi, 2014), another one is based on unintentional timing mechanism (Los & Van den Heuvel, 2001; Los, 2013). There are also some other papers in this area that tested the validity of these competing models, and I also contributed to this discussion. Actually, temporal preparation is one of my fields of expertise, I did my PhD in on the dynamics of temporal preparation in variable-forperiod (simple-RT task) settings.

It is not so easy to explain the models here, I will try to make a video which animates the dynamics of  the proposed mechanism more vividly. Maybe I will do this on weekend, when I have more time, but here are some recent papes on this subject: Note that the terminus "interstimulus-interval" is often referred to as foreperiod interval (FP, when considered as preparatory time), or as interstimulus-interval (ITI, when considered as spacing time between trials). The critical manipulation whose effects are subject of current theorizing are (1) foreperiod length and variability, (2) foreperiod distribution, (3) stimulus salience (intensity and duration, modality), (4) stimulus modality and modality-pairing, (5) advance information (temporal cues) to voluntarily orient attention to specific time points:

Niemi, P., & Naatanen, R. (1981). Foreperiod and Simple Reaction-Time. Psychological Bulletin, 89(1), 133-162.

Los, S. A. (2013). The role of response inhibition in temporal preparation: Evidence from a go/no-go task. Cognition, 129(2), 328-344. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.07.013

Langner, R., Steinborn, M. B., Chatterjee, A., Sturm, W., & Willmes, K. (2010). Mental fatigue and temporal preparation in simple reaction-time performance. Acta Psychologica, 133(1), 64-72.

Steinborn, M. B., & Langner, R. (2012). Arousal modulates temporal preparation under increased time uncertainty: Evidence from higher-order sequential foreperiod effects. Acta Psychologica, 139(1), 65-76.

Steinborn, M. B., Rolke, B., Bratzke, D., & Ulrich, R. (2009). Dynamic adjustment of temporal preparation: Shifting warning signal modality attenuates the sequential foreperiod effect. Acta Psychologica, 132(1), 40-47.

Los, S. A., & Van den Heuvel, C. E. (2001). Intentional and unintentional contributions to nonspecific preparation during reaction time foreperiods. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 27(2), 370-386.

Vallesi, A., Lozano, V. N., & Correa, A. (2013). Dissociating temporal preparation processes as a function of the inter-trial interval duration. Cognition, 127(1), 22-30. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.11.011

Vallesi, A., Arbula, S., & Bernardis, P. (2014). Functional dissociations in temporal preparation: Evidence from dual-task performance. Cognition, 130(2), 141-151. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.006

Capizzi, M., Sanabria, D., & Correa, A. (2012). Dissociating controlled from automatic processing in temporal preparation. Cognition, 123(2), 293-302. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.02.005

Best regards,

Micha 

--

Dr. Michael B. Steinborn

Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

Psychologie III, Angewandte Kognition & Methoden

Röntgenring 11, Raum H07

97070 Würzburg

www.michaelsteinborn.de

Email: [email protected]

Tel. +49-931-30-81725

...to be continued.

Los, S. A., & Van den Heuvel, C. E. (2001). Intentional and unintentional contributions to nonspecific preparation during reaction time foreperiods. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 27(2), 370-386.

Capizzi, M., Sanabria, D., & Correa, A. (2012). Dissociating controlled from automatic processing in temporal preparation. Cognition, 123(2), 293-302. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.02.005

Vallesi, A., Arbula, S., & Bernardis, P. (2014). Functional dissociations in temporal preparation: Evidence from dual-task performance. Cognition, 130(2), 141-151. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.006

Vallesi, A., Lozano, V. N., & Correa, A. (2013). Dissociating temporal preparation processes as a function of the inter-trial interval duration. Cognition, 127(1), 22-30. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.11.011

Best regards,

Micha

Hi Micha, thanks for the info. I would certainly appreciate an explanation. I wonder if it might be interesting to use the foreperiod interval timing of the PVT to characterize the nature or degree of the sustained attention loss (short- vs longer-term attention). C.

Fatigue and sleep deprivation cause a significant deterioration in the surgical residents' cognitive skills as measured by virtual reality simulation. Psychomotor skills are also negatively impacted during tasks that require a combination of psychomotor and cognitive skills.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18194679

I don't know if this would be odd or redundant, or even what the proper protocol is precisely but would like to offer some similar info I placed over in a discussion of sleep and neurocognitive computer testing. I apologize if I don't match it up perfectly but will do my best. It also encompasses some elements of fatigue but was here: 

The question over there, the person was asking about using computer cognitive CANTAB for assessing sleep people. I will adapt from there. 

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_the_CANTAB_a_good_Neuropsychological_Test_to_use?tpr_view=1L1JXYgrvsTYnL4Ey2UHsKtvJZ1RO7o7gvmS_2#587838bceeae39668a2c52f3

Is this OK to do?  BEGIN HERE:

So, in the discussion above I also struggle to see--are you JUST looking at Fatigue impact or also trying to sort out unknown sleep disorders. Say, suppose the person has fatigue because of sleep apnea--where they are deoxygenating--and their body is rousing again and again so not really getting sleep. 

Or, fatigue from early sleep latency--so trouble falling asleep?

Or tired because their legs are bouncing around, maybe with RLS or limb movement disorder?

Or fatigue with depression, chronic illness?

Because, each cause--different items might pop out on cognitive testing. What do you want to know? What do you want to be careful not to miss? What do you want to control for?  

For example in sleep apnea,  the neurocognitive changes include test changes in sustained attention, psychomotor speed, working memory, novel problem solving, inhibitory control, and verbal fluency but much less abnormality in delayed recall and processing speed. In Narcolepsy you would want to be sure the test included cognitive assessment of vigilance, attention, and memory. RLS and PLMD--for reasons less clear (to me anyway!!) impact straight executive function. Straight sleep deprivation has some global impact on

In Narcolepsy you would want to be sure the test reviewed cognitive assessment of vigilance, attention, &  memory. RLS and PLMD--better test-- straight executive function. Straight sleep deprivation has some global impact on

RLS and PLMD--better test-- straight executive function. Straight sleep deprivation has some global impact on

"Pure " sleep deprivation has some global impact on executive function like above but much LARGER impact on attention, vigilance, processing speed (slows reaction times),  working memory, and sometimes  ( depends on subjects resiliency ) altered short-term memory, verbal fluency, language , (as mentioned executive functioning..

Sleep latency insomnia generally tests out as more "higher cognitive" troubles.

______

 Then--Fatigue! So subjective!! It seems a daunting subject.

What normal, what normal for your society, your culture, who gets to nap? I mean do you mean anhedonia? Hungry? Bored? Sleepy? Fatigue is a laden word!!

Let's pause here!

Ego Depletion Is Not Just Fatigue

Evidence From a Total Sleep Deprivation Experiment

Kathleen D. Vohs, Brian D. Glass, W. Todd Maddox, Arthur B. Markman

First Published October 4, 2010 review-article

Anderson C. (2009). The impact of sleep on dealing with daily stressors—A need for controlled laboratory evidence. Stress and Health, 26, 194–197. ,

Self-reported sleep duration and cognitive functioning in the general population.

Kronholm E, Sallinen M, Suutama T, Sulkava R, Era P, Partonen T.

J Sleep Res. 2009 Dec; 18(4):436-46. Epub 2009 Aug 31.

Usual sleep duration and cognitive function in older adults in Spain.

Faubel R, López-García E, Guallar-Castillón P, Graciani A, Banegas JR, Rodríguez-Artalejo F.

J Sleep Res. 2009 Dec; 18(4):427-35. Epub 2009 Aug 19.

The Social Patterning of Sleep in African Americans: Associations of Socioeconomic Position and Neighborhood Characteristics with Sleep in the Jackson Heart Study.

Johnson DA, Lisabeth L, Hickson D, Johnson-Lawrence V, Samdarshi T, Taylor H, Diez Roux AV.

Sleep. 2016 Sep 1; 39(9):1749-59. Epub 2016 Sep 1.

Trends in self-reported sleep duration and insomnia-related symptoms in Finland from 1972 to 2005: a comparative review and re-analysis of Finnish population samples.

Kronholm E, Partonen T, Laatikainen T, Peltonen M, Härmä M, Hublin C, Kaprio J, Aro AR, Partinen M, Fogelholm M, et al.

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Harrison Y., Horne J. A. (1998). Sleep loss affects risk-taking. Journal of Sleep Research, 7(Suppl. 2):113. 

Anderson C. A., Bushman B. J. (1997). External validity of “trivial” experiments: The case of laboratory aggression. General Psychology Review, 1, 19–41. , 

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Then how do you control for comorbid conditions if testing sleep, fatigue on neurocognitive ideas below? 

How do you control for MDD? 40% of MDD patients were are so significantly cognitively impaired, performing at the 2nd percentile of control subjects. Doing people over 50? Keeping out those depressed? Those diagnosed with depression, whether or not medicated have

Doing people over 50? Keeping out those depressed? Those diagnosed with depression, whether or not medicated have poor cognitive function at about level of schizophrenia but better than Alzheimer's . Hard info!

And, will you rule out silent sleep apnea with oxygen saturation one night? Suppose that person's cognitive findings were NOT due to sleep deprivation but to low oxygen also at night?

And, now getting down to smaller items: Suppose an older woman took Vitamin E and exercised so she had more resilient result in neurocognitive testing? Maybe curcumin extract, less stress? 

It seems so hard to think out a good way to gather data and I admire the work that goes into it! Anyway, hope this is helpful and not annoying.  

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LINK # 1 NASA FATIGUE TESTING

NASA has  developed a computer program to assess sleep and fatigue in their astronauts. I was thinking you may find it helpful as it outlines their parameters in the critical work in space: 

"Individualized Real-Time Neurocognitive Assessment Toolkit for Space Flight Fatigue (Cognition) is a battery of tests that measure how spaceflight-related physical changes, such as microgravity and lack of sleep, can affect cognitive performance. Cognition includes ten brief computerized tests that cover a wide range of cognitive functions, and provides immediate feedback on current and past test results. The software allows for real-time measurement of cognitive performance while in space.

Earth Applications

Cognition includes a wide range of computerized cognitive tests, which could be used in a variety of situations on Earth. The tests could determine whether fatigue or other stress factors are compromising a person’s ability to think and act clearly. The tests are brief and can be completed on a computer in virtually any setting."

The Cognition battery is a 20-30 minute computerized test battery of cognitive tests. Besides a sleep questionnaire and brief subjective evaluations at the beginning, Cognition contains the following 10 tests (each test is mentioned with the primary cognitive domains covered):

Motor Praxis (MPraxis): Sensory-motor ability

Visual Object Learning (VOLT): Visual object learning and memory

Fractal 2-Back (F2B): Attention and working memory

Abstract Matching Task (AMT): Abstraction

Line Orientation (LOT): Spatial orientation

Emotion Recognition (ER): Emotion recognition

Matrix Reasoning (MRsT): Abstract reasoning

Digit Symbol Substitution (DSST): Complex scanning, visual tracking, attention

Balloon Analog Risk (BART): Risk decision making

Psychomotor Vigilance (PVT): Vigilant attention and psychomotor speed.

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LINK # 2 WHO AND U OF OREGON study

  WHO/ Univer Oregon Some useful baseline sleep references  test ideas.

Theresa E. Gildner, M.S.1; Melissa A. Liebert, M.S.1; Paul Kowal, Pharm.D.2,3; Somnath Chatterji, M.D.2; J. Josh Snodgrass, Ph.D.1

1Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; 2World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland; 3University of Newcastle Research Centre on Gender, Health, and Ageing, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

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# 3    LINK # 3 Cognitive Test that is useful

If any interest, this provides some alternative tests,  though may not have enough validation. Read this as it follows:

_ Reliability and validity of a computerized neurocognitive test battery, CNS Vital Signs

C. Thomas Gualtieri a,∗, Lynda G Johnson b

a Department of Neuropsychiatry, North Carolina Neuropsychiatry Clinics, 400 Franklin Square, 1829 East Franklin Street,

Chapel Hill NC 2751, United States b Department of Neuropsychology, North Carolina Neuropsychiatry Clinics, Chapel Hill NC 2751, United States

Accepted 31 May 2006

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OTHER TESTS LIKELY USEFUL FATIGUE NEUROCOGNIT|VE TESTING

 Oliveira MO, Brucki SMD. Computerized Neurocognitive Test (CNT) in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Dement. Neuropsychol. 2014;8(2):112-116

The aim of this review was to compare the features of the computerized neuropsychological batteries used in most studies involving the cognitively impaired over the last 10 years, in order to verify which are most suitable for use in clinical practice within an outpatient clinic.

Reviews these neuro cognitive testing

This study reviewed CogState.7, CNS Vital Signs (VS), Cognitive Drug Research Computerized Assessment System (COGDRAS), Mindstreams (Neurotrax), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA Test)

"A review article about advances in design for AD in clinical trials compared the most widely used tests, namely, Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics (ANAM),31 Computer Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment (CAMCI),32 CANS-MCI,33 CANTAB,34,35 CNSVS, Cognitive Drug Research (CDR/COGDRAS), CogState, Cognitive Skills Index (CSI),36 MicroCog and Mindstreams (Neurotrax). Strengths and weaknesses were detected for all tests, but the authors were emphatic in affirming that computerized assessment offers several advantages over pen-and-paper tests, in that they have a high degree of standardization in administration and scoring and can measure reaction time accurately."

References: 

Reliability and validity of the NeuroCognitive Performance Test, a web-based neuropsychological assessment.

Morrison GE, Simone CM, Ng NF, Hardy JL.

Front Psychol. 2015 Nov 3; 6:1652. Epub 2015 Nov 3.

Kane RL, Kay GG. Computerized assessment in neuropsychology: A review of tests and test batteries. Neuropsychol Rev. 1992;3:1–117. 

 Gur RC, Ragland JD, Moberg PJ, et al. Computerized neurocognitive scanning: I. Methodology and validation in healthy people. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2001;25:766–76. 

Robbins TW, James M, Owen AM, et al. A study of performance on tests from the CANTAB battery sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction in a large sample of normal volunteers: Implications for theories of executive functioning and cognitive aging.Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery. J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 1998;4:474–90

Wesnes K. Assessing cognitive function in clinical trials: Latest developments and future directions. Drug Discovery Today. 2002;7:29–35.

Gualtieri CT, Johson LG. Reability and validity of a computerized neurocognitive test battery, CNS Vital Signs. Arch Clin Neuropsychol 2006;21:623-643.

 Elwood RW. MicroCog: assessment of cognitive functioning. Neuropsychol Rev 2001;11:89-100.

 Martin TA. Ethical challenges with the use of information technology and telecommunications in neuropsychology. In: Bush S. A casebook of ethical challenges in neuropsychology. London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005.

 CogState. The global leader in assessing, monitoring and improving cognition. Acessed on: http://cogstate.com/academic/#.Uvef32JdWSo

 Gualtieri T, Computerized Neurocognitive Testing and its Potential for Modern Psychiatry. Psychiatry (Edgmont). 2004;1:29-36.

 Gualtieri CT, Johnson LG. Reliability and validity of a computerized neurocognitive test battery, CNS Vital Signs. Arch Clin Neuropsychol 2006;21:623-43.

Best Marybeth Lambe MD FAAFP

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1256.html#publications

http://www.aasmnet.org/jcsm/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=29504

https://www.schoolhealth.com/media/pdf/91279_cnsvs_reliability.pdf

It would be interesting to see how individuals with fibromyalgia are influenced by fatigue and whether this has any feedback into the ongoing nature of the illness in a small or large way.