Effects on Consciousness - Sleep Deprivation Compared to BAC Flashcards
What is sleep in terms of consciousness?
a natural occurring altered state
unconscious and unaware of inner and outer stimuli
What does sleep deprivation do in the short term?
Makes you tired
irritable
cognitively impaired
What did Dawson and Reid discover in their experiment (1997)?
They compared levels of sleep deprivation that could be equivalent to different BAC percentages
the experiment consisted of keep participants awake for 24 hours and measuring their cognitive abilities as time passed, they called this ‘sustained consciousness’
by hour 17 performance had decreased to a BAC of 0.05% comparatively
by hour 24 performance was equivalent to a BAC of 0.10%
What is the legal limit of blood alcohol concentration?
fully licensed adults - 0.05%
learners and P platers - 0%
What is the experimental design for the sleep deprivation study?
40 participants
repeated measures
the first condition were awake for 28 hours (8am-12 noon next day)
the second condition were asked to reach BAC 0.10% by drinking 15 grams of alcohol every half hour
each condition was assessed every half hour for ‘cognitive psychomotor performance’
What is ‘cognitive psychomotor performance’ ?
a computer administered hand-eye coordination test with unpredictable tracking was used in the experiment
hand-eye coordination refers to visual processing that guide hand movements
the test requires concentration, speed, accuracy and decision making to be used
What results did the experiment find?
performance on tasks decreased a lot in each condition
Statistical analysis led Dawson and Reid to conclude that the effects of moderate sleep deprivation (around 17 hours) on performance can be compared to moderate alcohol intoxication (0.05%).
Extreme sleep deprivation (24 hours) performance results are similar to a BAC of 0.1
Furthermore, the results showed that the performance impairment effects of moderate sleep deprivation are equivalent to or greater than the level of alcohol that is deemed legally unacceptable when driving, working and/or operating dangerous machinery
harder to generalise bc the computer created simple tasks
