EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF VIGILANCE: EFFECTS OF PARTIAL PRIVATION OF SLEEP AND TASK DIFFICULTY

Abstract

One of the more important factors that can affect the capacity to mantain an appropiate alert level is the length of the sleep period. A lot of studies has been carried out, most of them classic studies, about the effect of total deprivation or selective deprivation of sleep phases in different physiological and psychological functions. The present study deal with the effect of partial deprivation of sleep on the subjective alert level and mental workload level, and the performance in two vilgilance or sustained attention tasks. Both of tasks have different difficulty degree. The performance in these tasks will be evaluated by measuring in hits, false alarms and reaction time (vigilance level index and vigilance decrement function index, respectively). The results suggest that performance does not consistent in the sense of our hypothesis.