Adding, Sleep Loss, and Body Temperature

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Abstract
At 8:00 A.M. and 8:00 P.M. during a 3-day baseline period, 3 days of sleep loss, and 2 days of recovery, 20 experimental and 20 control Ss added pairs of one-digit numbers for 3 min. The most marked effect of sleep loss was to lower the speed of addition. The correlation of speed of addition and oral temperature was considerably higher than the correlation of adding speed with sleep loss. The speed during P.M. was higher than A.M. speed during the baseline period, and this difference tended to increase with sleep loss. However, the trend was not statistically significant. Accuracy of addition was very high throughout all test sessions, although there was a very slight decline during sleep loss. Accuracy was not affected by the diurnal cycle, and there was no independent correlation between accuracy and oral temperature. The findings support the hypothesis that the specific effect of sleep loss on performance varies with the nature of the task, and depends on measurement of the sensitive aspect of performance.