Combined Effects of Sleep Deprivation, Narrow Space, Social Isolation and High Cognitive Workload on Cognitive Ability of Chinese Operators.

This study aims to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation on the cognitive abilities of Chinese subjects under a combined scenario of narrow space, social isolation, and high cognitive workload. Twelve subjects participated in the experiment of 72-hour sleep deprivation, and took 15 cognitive ability tests for three times at the first day of sleep deprivation (level 1), the second day of sleep deprivation (level 2) and the third day of sleep deprivation (level 3) respectively. The result data analyses show that: most of the cognitive abilities do not change significantly, but the value of special graphics search is increased significantly with the increasing of sleep deprivation time (p =0.01). In addition, when four cognitive ability tests were combined into one complex measure, the effect of sleep deprivation becomes more significant. The results mainly support the Hockey's compensatory control model. And they may be due to two other reasons: one is that the combined stressors will counteract each other; the other is that learning effect can improve operators' performance. The results also imply that sensitive and complex measures need to be developed and used to reflect the compound effects of sleep deprivation under such combined situation.