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THE EFFECTS OF ACUTE SLEEP DEPRIVATION ON SELECTIVE ATTENTION
Author(s) -
NORTON ROYAN
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1970.tb01233.x
Subject(s) - vigilance (psychology) , sleep deprivation , sleep loss , psychology , selective attention , task (project management) , sleep (system call) , cognitive psychology , audiology , developmental psychology , cognition , neuroscience , medicine , management , computer science , economics , operating system
It has been shown that performance in vigilance tasks deteriorates greatly after loss of sleep. It is hypothesized that deterioration in these and other tasks is largely due to a breakdown in the ability to attend selectively to relevant information in the task. An experiment is described in which subjects' performance in a task involving ignoring irrelevant information was shown to deteriorate more after sleep loss than performance on the same task without irrelevant information present. It is suggested that sleep plays an important part in maintaining selective attention and the symptoms shown by sleep‐deprived subjects are largely due to a failure in selective attention.