The Effects Of Sleep Deprivation On Behavior And Performance

Many studies that research the effects of sleep on behavior and performance focus on assessment criteria believed to be sensitive to sleepiness, like basic skills such as memory and reflexes. These tests with very little outside factors in laboratory environments -making for no environmental stimuli- make for good conditions to observe the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain and it’s performance.

However, when it comes to it’s real life effects, reaching a conclusion becomes a bit more difficult. When sleep deprivation studies have been done in real-life settings, the results can be confusing. A study has been done to interning doctors who experience sleep deprivation quite often. This in contrast to various other studies done in laboratory settings have focused on participants doing what they actually do everyday, and that has brought interesting results. In the study by Beatty, Adhern, and Katz (1977) it has been found that anesthesia specialists, after being up all night (on call), were just as good in monitoring vital signs in a surgical simulation; although they were impaired in taking a critical reasoning test. Leung and Becker (1992) mention the inconsistency in the results in the compilation and review of studies between 1984 and 1991 in the subject. They conclude that the large number of studies can leas to no conclusions because of the imperfect way in which they were all conducted. They argue that the lack of control data, bad methodology and badly defined sleep deprivation criterion are the reasons.

For example, as control the studies use off days, but those being one day a week after a week of sleep deprivation, it is possible that the effects of sleep deprivation are not worn off and therefore through the comparison of these two scenarios, the effects of sleep deprivation are underestimated. The only finding that has been consisten through all the studies presented by Leung and Becker have been the mood of the doctor, but that’s effect on performance and decision making is not known either. A study by Deary and Tait (1987) again focusing on real life scenarios by doctors, measured performance in the afternoons after four types of nights which were being off duty, on call or working continuously in the emergency room. The last situation resulted in the worst effects and the sleep deprivation was found to cause significant effects on mood.

Another study, by V J Brown (1994) concluded that doctors and medical students which were sleep deprived were still able fully understand long and complicated articles from a medical journal. Goldman, McDonough and Rosemond (1972) concluded that sleep deprived interning doctors were generally more hesitant in making decisions. Nelson, Dell’Angela, Jellish, Brown and Skaredoff (1995) found anesthesiologists who had less than 30 mins of sleep were worse in creative thinking and fluency but their abilities in complex tasks were intact. A conclusion that can be reached from some of the earlier studies in effects of sleep deprivation is that the ability and performance in more complex tasks are generally unaffected wheras simple tasks and abilities seem to be more so with sleep deprivation. The generally agreed upon view by the studies mentioned in the previous paragraph is that clinicians apply extra effort in the complex scenarios to compensate for their sleepiness as they are aware of it and know that they need to overcome it to perform as they need to. Wilkinson (1992) has argued that “sleep deprivation reduces the non-specific arousal level of the body but has no specific effects” and argued against using as parameters tasks that can be “too complex, too interesting, too variable and above all too short. ” He also supported the idea that these tasks encourage the application of compensatory effort by the participants and therefore do not yield the true effects of sleep deprivation. So tasks that encourage any extra effort seem to be insensitive to sleep deprivation. However this is not a fault in a study, yet it is a conclusion on its own.

It can be assumed, taking into account the information from the previous paragraph, that sleep deprivation therefore has very little impact on big decision-making or complex scenarios. This has been the result laid out by some studies. For example, Horne (1988) found that IQ tests results are insensitive to sleep deprivation until about 36 hours of it. Hockey, Wastell and Sauer (1998) and Linde, Edland, and Bergstrom (1999) devised tasks requiring multiple levels of