Sleep and Performance Research Center and Neuroscience Program, Washington State University, Spokane, WA 99210-1495, USA.
Curr Top Med Chem. 2011;11(19):2414-22. doi: 10.2174/156802611797470286.
Waking neurobehavioral performance is temporally regulated by a sleep/wake homeostatic process and a circadian process in interaction with a time-on-task effect. Neurobehavioral impairment resulting from these factors is task-specific, and characterized by performance variability. Several aspects of these phenomena are not well understood, and cannot be explained solely by a top-down (subcortically driven) view of sleep/wake and performance regulation. We present a bottom-up theory, where we postulate that task performance is degraded by local, use-dependent sleep in neuronal groups subserving cognitive processes associated with the task at hand. The theory offers explanations for the temporal dependence of neurobehavioral performance on time awake, time on task, and their interaction; for the effectiveness of task switching and rest breaks to overcome the time-on-task effect (but not the effects of sleep deprivation); for the task-specific nature of neurobehavioral impairment; and for the stochastic property of performance variability.
清醒时的神经行为表现受到睡眠/觉醒稳态过程和昼夜节律过程的时间调节，这两个过程与任务时间效应相互作用。这些因素导致的神经行为障碍具有任务特异性，并表现为性能的可变性。这些现象的几个方面还没有得到很好的理解，不能仅仅通过自上而下（皮质下驱动）的睡眠/觉醒和性能调节观点来解释。我们提出了一个自下而上的理论，其中我们假设任务表现会因与手头任务相关的认知过程的神经元群的局部、使用依赖性睡眠而降低。该理论为神经行为表现对清醒时间、任务时间及其相互作用的时间依赖性提供了解释；为任务切换和休息时间来克服任务时间效应（但不能克服睡眠剥夺的影响）提供了解释；为神经行为障碍的任务特异性提供了解释；并为性能可变性的随机性质提供了解释。
