Lack of Sleep can Influence Performance
If you don't get the recommended eight hours of sleep every night, you might want to rearrange your schedule to fit the extra hours in. New research has found that a lack of sleep can influence the way you perform certain tasks.
Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital have revealed that regardless of how tired you perceive yourself to be, that lack of sleep can influence the way you perform certain tasks.
Jeanne F. Duffy, senior author on the study said the effect of sleep on the body is important, especially for people with certain jobs.
"Our team decided to look at how sleep might affect complex visual search tasks, because they are common in safety-sensitive activities, such as air-traffic control, baggage screening, and monitoring power plant operations," Duffy said. "These types of jobs involve processes that require repeated, quick memory encoding and retrieval of visual information, in combination with decision making about the information."
This study is published in the July 26, 2012 online edition of The Journal of Vision.
Researchers collected and examined data from visual search tasks from 12 participants over a one month period. In the first week, all participants were scheduled to sleep 10-12 hours per night to make sure they were well-rested. For the following three weeks, the participants were scheduled to sleep the equivalent of 5.6 hours per night, and also had their sleep times scheduled on a 28-hour cycle, mirroring chronic jet lag.
The research team gave the participants computer tests that involved visual search tasks and recorded how quickly the participants could find important information, and also how accurate they were in identifying it. According to the researchers, the longer the participants were awake, the more slowly they identified the important information in the test. Additionally, during the biological night time, 12 a.m. -6 a.m., participants, who were unaware of the time throughout the study, also performed the tasks more slowly than they did during the daytime.
Researcher say that their findings provide valuable information for workers and their employers because they will do it much more slowly than when they are working during the day.
"The longer someone is awake, the more the ability to perform a task, in this case a visual search, is hindered, and this impact of being awake is even stronger at night," Duffy said.
However, researchers did note that the accuracy of the participants stayed fairly constant, even though they were slower to identify the relevant information as the weeks went on.
The self-ratings of sleepiness only got slightly worse during the second and third weeks on the study schedule, yet the data show that they were performing the visual search tasks significantly slower than in the first week. The researchers say their findings suggest that someone's perceptions of how tired they are do not always match their performance ability.
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