PVT

From MindModelingWiki

A long history of research has revealed many neurophysiologic changes and concomitant behavioral impacts of sleep deprivation, sleep restriction, and circadian rhythm. A major goal of this research is generating precise predictions about how cognitive performance will be affected, both as a function of a particular sleep history and at particular points in the circadian cycle. Our approach to achieving this goal is to link predictions of alertness from existing biomathematical models to parameters in a cognitive architecture, bridging the gap between the abstract concept of alertness and objective measures of cognitive performance. This process began by identifying mechanisms within the architecture to capture the effects of sleep deprivation. We used neurobehavioral research examining the effects of fatigue and theoretical claims about localization of information processing mechanisms within the brain to develop a set of cognitively and neuropsychologically plausible set of mechanisms within the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture. Those mechanisms, integrated with biomathematical predictions for alertness, account for a set of results in the Psychomotor Vigilance Test, a sustained attention task validated to be sensitive to fatigue.