Department of Sleep and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Prog Brain Res. 2011;193:245-55. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53839-0.00016-8.
Total sleep deprivation in healthy subjects has a profound effect on the performance on tasks measuring sustained attention or vigilance. We here report how a selective disruption of deep sleep only, that is, selective slow-wave activity (SWA) reduction, affects the performance of healthy well-sleeping subjects on several tasks: a "simple" and a "complex" vigilance task, a declarative learning task, and an implicit learning task despite unchanged duration of sleep. We used automated electroencephalogram (EEG) dependent acoustic feedback aimed at selective interference with-and reduction of-SWA. In a within-subject repeated measures crossover design, performance on the tasks was assessed in 13 elderly adults without sleep complaints after either SWA-reduction or after normal sleep. The number of vigilance lapses increased as a result of SWA reduction, irrespective of the type of vigilance task. Recognition on the declarative memory task was also affected by SWA reduction, associated with a decreased activation of the right hippocampus on encoding (measured with fMRI) suggesting a weaker memory trace. SWA reduction, however, did not affect reaction time on either of the vigilance tasks or implicit memory task performance. These findings suggest a specific role of slow oscillations in the subsequent daytime ability to maintain sustained attention and to encode novel declarative information but not to maintain response speed or to build implicit memories. Of particular interest is that selective SWA reduction can mimic some of the effects of total sleep deprivation, while not affecting sleep duration.
健康受试者的完全睡眠剥夺对测量持续注意力或警觉性的任务表现有深远影响。我们在此报告仅选择性地破坏深度睡眠，即选择性地减少慢波活动（SWA），如何影响健康睡眠良好的受试者在几项任务上的表现：一项“简单”和一项“复杂”警觉任务、一项陈述性学习任务和一项内隐学习任务，尽管睡眠时间不变。我们使用自动脑电图（EEG）相关的声反馈来有针对性地干扰和减少 SWA。在一项 13 名无睡眠问题的老年人的自身重复交叉设计中，在 SWA 减少或正常睡眠后，评估了他们在这些任务上的表现。由于 SWA 减少，警觉性失误的次数增加，而不管警觉性任务的类型如何。在陈述性记忆任务上的识别也受到 SWA 减少的影响，这与编码时右海马体的激活减少有关（通过 fMRI 测量），表明记忆痕迹较弱。然而，SWA 减少并没有影响警觉性任务或内隐记忆任务的反应时间。这些发现表明慢波振荡在后日白天维持持续注意力和编码新的陈述性信息的能力中具有特定作用，但不能维持反应速度或建立内隐记忆。特别有趣的是，选择性 SWA 减少可以模拟完全睡眠剥夺的一些影响，而不影响睡眠时间。
