The cognitive effects of sleep loss are often attributed to compromised functioning of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, compromised PFC functioning does not account for well-known effects of sleep deprivation on vigilance. Furthermore, the executive attentional control functions associated with the PFC show considerable variability in the effects of sleep deprivation. Evidence from neuroimaging suggests that sleep deprived people are sometimes able to maintain performance on cognitive tasks by increasing PFC activation of task-relevant circuits and by recruiting new circuits not typically involved in a particular cognitive operation. Still, little is known about how such compensatory processes work on a functional level, or what tradeoffs in processing they may entail. We propose a dynamic attentional control framework to bridge the gap between the evidence on sleep deprived neural circuits and cognitive task performance. We review evidence that shows that the pattern of preserved and compromised task performance can be understood in terms of sleep deprivation's influence on frontostriatal circuitry such that the ability to maintain task-relevant information in the focus of attention is relatively spared but the ability to update task-relevant information in response to changing circumstances is more negatively affected. This framework helps account for why some tasks are more affected by SD than others, and why individual differences in the effects of sleep deprivation are task-specific.
Keywords: Cognitive control; Cognitive flexibility; Cognitive impairment; Dopamine; Gene polymorphisms; Individual differences; Sleep loss.
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