Sleep Deprivation Data
SleepDeprivation.RdResearchers have established that sleep deprivation has a harmful effect on visual learning (the subject does not consolidate information to improve on the task). Stickgold, James, and Hobson (2000) investigated whether subjects could “make up” for sleep deprivation by getting a full night’s sleep in subsequent nights. This study involved randomly assigning 21 subjects (volunteers between the ages of 18 and 25) to one of two groups: one group was deprived of sleep on the night following training with a visual discrimination task, and the other group was permitted unrestricted sleep on that first night. Both groups were allowed unrestricted sleep on the following two nights, and then were re-tested on the third day. Subjects’ performance on the test was recorded as the minimum time (in milliseconds) between stimuli appearing on a computer screen for which they could accurately report what they had seen on the screen. Previous studies had shown that subjects deprived of sleep performed significantly worse the following day, but it was not clear how long these negative effects would last. The data presented here are the improvements in reaction times (in milliseconds), so a negative value indicates a decrease in performance.