Faculty of Psychology, 'Vita-Salute' San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy.
Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Neurology - Sleep Disorders Center, IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy.
J Sleep Res. 2017 Jun;26(3):338-344. doi: 10.1111/jsr.12487. Epub 2016 Dec 29.
Insomnia disorder is associated with both subjective and objective daytime impairments. In particular, cognitive impairments are frequently reported. However, little is known about the effects of this pathology on perceptual processes. In this study we aim at evaluating the effect of insomnia disorder on visual processing by employing a visual search paradigm. Twenty-three patients with insomnia disorder and 20 healthy age- and sex-matched control subjects participated in the study. After a polysomnographic recording night patients performed a visual search task in which they had to respond to the presence/absence of a target (letter T) embedded into a set of distractors (letters Os, Xs or Ls). Target's salience and distractors' numerosity were manipulated, while accuracy and reaction times were recorded as dependent variables. The results mainly confirmed the typical effects of a visual search task. An overall delay in performing the task was observed for patients with insomnia disorder. However, distinguishing the reaction times to stimuli containing the target from reaction times to stimuli in which the target was absent, the clinical group differed from controls solely in the condition of target absent. The performance (reaction times) of the subjects correlated with the age in the control group, whereas no correlation between reaction times and age, disease duration and quality of sleep was found in patients with insomnia disorder. These results experimentally demonstrate the presence of a daytime impairment in patients with insomnia disorder revealed by a dissociation in visual search, and are discussed in the light of the hyperarousal concept of insomnia.
失眠障碍与主观和客观的日间损害有关。特别是，经常报告认知障碍。然而，对于这种病理学对感知过程的影响知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们旨在通过使用视觉搜索范式来评估失眠障碍对视觉处理的影响。 23 名失眠症患者和 20 名年龄和性别匹配的健康对照者参加了研究。在进行多导睡眠记录的晚上，患者进行了视觉搜索任务，他们必须对嵌入分心物（字母 O、X 或 L）的集合中的目标（字母 T）的存在/不存在做出反应。目标的显着性和分心物的数量被操纵，同时记录准确性和反应时间作为因变量。结果主要证实了视觉搜索任务的典型影响。失眠症患者在执行任务时整体延迟。然而，将包含目标的刺激的反应时间与目标不存在的刺激的反应时间区分开来，与对照组相比，临床组仅在目标不存在的情况下有所不同。对照组中，受试者的表现（反应时间）与年龄相关，而失眠症患者的反应时间与年龄、疾病持续时间和睡眠质量之间没有相关性。这些结果通过视觉搜索中的分离实验证明了失眠症患者在白天存在损害，并根据失眠症的过度唤醒概念进行了讨论。
