Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore, Singapore.
PLoS One. 2010 Feb 5;5(2):e9087. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009087.
Most prior studies on selective attention in the setting of total sleep deprivation (SD) have focused on behavior or activation within fronto-parietal cognitive control areas. Here, we evaluated the effects of SD on the top-down biasing of activation of ventral visual cortex and on functional connectivity between cognitive control and other brain regions.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Twenty-three healthy young adult volunteers underwent fMRI after a normal night of sleep (RW) and after sleep deprivation in a counterbalanced manner while performing a selective attention task. During this task, pictures of houses or faces were randomly interleaved among scrambled images. Across different blocks, volunteers responded to house but not face pictures, face but not house pictures, or passively viewed pictures without responding. The appearance of task-relevant pictures was unpredictable in this paradigm. SD resulted in less accurate detection of target pictures without affecting the mean false alarm rate or response time. In addition to a reduction of fronto-parietal activation, attending to houses strongly modulated parahippocampal place area (PPA) activation during RW, but this attention-driven biasing of PPA activation was abolished following SD. Additionally, SD resulted in a significant decrement in functional connectivity between the PPA and two cognitive control areas, the left intraparietal sulcus and the left inferior frontal lobe.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: SD impairs selective attention as evidenced by reduced selectivity in PPA activation. Further, reduction in fronto-parietal and ventral visual task-related activation suggests that it also affects sustained attention. Reductions in functional connectivity may be an important additional imaging parameter to consider in characterizing the effects of sleep deprivation on cognition.
大多数关于完全睡眠剥夺（SD）背景下选择性注意的先前研究都集中在前额顶叶认知控制区域的行为或激活上。在这里，我们评估了 SD 对腹侧视觉皮层激活的自上而下偏向以及认知控制和其他大脑区域之间的功能连接的影响。
方法/主要发现：23 名健康的年轻成年志愿者以平衡的方式在正常睡眠（RW）和睡眠剥夺后进行 fMRI 检查，同时执行选择性注意任务。在这个任务中，房子或脸的图片与杂乱的图片随机交替出现。在不同的块中，志愿者对房子但不是脸的图片、脸但不是房子的图片做出反应，或者被动地观看图片而不做出反应。在这个范式中，任务相关图片的出现是不可预测的。SD 导致目标图片的检测准确性降低，而不影响平均假警报率或反应时间。除了减少额顶叶激活外，在 RW 期间，注视房子强烈调节了旁海马区位置区域（PPA）的激活，但在 SD 后，这种 PPA 激活的注意驱动偏向被消除。此外，SD 导致 PPA 与两个认知控制区域（左顶内沟和左额下回）之间的功能连接显著降低。
结论/意义：SD 损害了选择性注意，表现为 PPA 激活的选择性降低。此外，额顶叶和腹侧视觉任务相关激活的减少表明它也影响了持续性注意。功能连接的减少可能是描述睡眠剥夺对认知影响的一个重要的额外成像参数。
