Location: For meeting details, please contact Steve directly (skahl@umd.edu)
Title: THE INFLUENCE OF BRAIN DYNAMICS DURING RESTRICTED SLEEP ON THE QUALITY OF PSYCHOMOTOR PERFORMANCE IN THE AWAKE STATE
Abstract:
Sleep has become so important to human performance that the United States Military has promoted sleep as one of the three major tenets of its Performance Triad (i.e., the essential role of sleep, exercise and nutrition for effective Soldier performance). This directive is important as the average sleep time has dropped below the recommendation of seven hours per night by the National Sleep Foundation. Sleep research is expanding in scope, but little is known about the impact of sleep restriction on next-day performance beyond reaction time (RT). There is also a dearth of information on the status of the Central Nervous System (CNS), as assessed via electroencephalography (EEG) during sleep on the quality of psychomotor performance during the awake state. Specifically, this study will examine the role of EEG slow-wave activity (SWA; 0.5 - 4 Hz; a biomarker for sleep need) on executive function underlying human performance. In this manner, the study will investigate an underlying neural mechanism of effect to account for performance in 10 healthy individuals aged 18-39 years. These individuals will participate in an intensive intervention to be conducted with both laboratory and at-home phases in partnership with the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research (WRAIR). Participants will be challenged with a battery of psychomotor tasks, involving demands on reactive capacity, vigilance and executive function, following restricted sleep (SR, 5 hours in bed/night for 7 nights) and habitual sleep (HS, 6-8 hours asleep per night for 10-14 days). Initially, performance will be contrasted between SR and HS to confirm performance degradation with sleep restriction as a manipulation check. Participants will be monitored with EEG during SR to assess SWA during the last hour of sleep. The quality of psychomotor performance will be regressed on the spectral power of SWA on nights 2, 4 and 7, using data from the first night for normalization. A negative relationship between the normalized SWA and task performance is predicted, which will progressively increase over the sleep restriction period from nights 2 to 7. This study provides a novel approach for predicting human performance under conditions of challenge (i.e., sleep deprivation as experienced by tactical athletes and others in emergency situations) by observing the dose-response relationship between the SWA biomarker of brain dynamics and psychomotor performance.
For meeting details, please contact Steve directly (skahl@umd.edu)
Advisor: Dr. Bradley Hatfield