Vigilance is the ability to quickly identify and respond to unpredictable stimuli over an extended period. It is an important part of activities such as driving, flying and radar monitoring, and it is affected by sleep loss. We investigated the …
Sleep restriction affects attention in different ways. Performance on an attentional blink task was unaffected by sleep restriction in two studies, but performance on a vigilance task was affected in both. In the second study, we looked at resting state EEG and found alpha was reduced after sleep restriction, which may have balanced out performance on the attentional blink task.
We are doing online experiments and surveys investigating the impact of sleep on essential human functions such as attention, memory, mood and decision-making.