Lost ZZZs May Mean Bad Decisions

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Sacrifice hours of shuteye and you may pay a toll on your ability to make critical decisions, a new study shows.

In a two-day examination, 49 West Point Cadets were tested twice on an information-integration categorization task. Those who properly rested improved their performance by 4.3 percent from day one to day two. Sleep deprived participants, however, declined in performance by 2.4 percent. Researchers says sleep deprivation may shift the brain from using automatic, implicit processing to using controlled, explicit, rule-based processing.

Sometimes, if information-integration strategies are not used, it may lead to potentially harmful consequences. For example, fast and accurate thinking that requires information-integration processing rather than rule-based categorization is necessary in situations like driving, making medical diagnoses and performing air-traffic control. Experts point out information-integration, or categorization, may be often impaired by those in public-safety careers that are often victims of sleep deprivation, such as doctors, firefighters and soldiers.

"The current study suggests that processing in these systems is minimally affected by sleep deprivation, but that performance can suffer because sleep deprivation leads many individuals to rely on explicit processes when implicit processes are necessary," Todd Maddox, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, and David M. Schnyer, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology also at UT, wrote in a statement.

SOURCE: Sleep, November 1, 2009