"This finding could be used to design training regimens for chronically sleep-deprived people, including members of the military and medical students," Hairston said. "That said, while the cognitive impairment may be overcome, our findings indicate that mild, chronic sleep restriction may have long-term deleterious effects on neural function," according to the paper.
Further studies could clarify learning strategies the brain employs
One implication of these findings is that sleep restriction disrupts the hierarchy of cognitive processes. That is, spatial learning seemed to be the primary cognitive strategy, and only when it was disrupted by lack of sleep, did a secondary strategy emerge. "It would be interesting to expand our findings to see if other competing processes are similarly affected by sleep restriction," Hairston said.
For example, scientists know that people who have suffered certain types of brain lesions may be unable to screen out irrelevant stimuli such as random noises in a room, something healthy individuals do easily. A flip side is that people with these lesions tend to associate familiar stimuli with new information more rapidly than healthy counterparts, a phenomenon called attention switching.
This suggests that learning to ignore stimuli and rapid attention switching are competing processes, with healthy individuals ignoring familiar stimuli as their primary strategy. It would be interesting to assess whether sleep restriction causes peop
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Source:American Physiological Society