engleski

Metacognitive assessments of different tasks in sleep deprivation condition

The aim of this research is to show the connection between metacognitive estimations and the results in different psychomotor and cognitive tasks in 36 hours of sleep deprivation, and how this connection differs according to complexity of the task. The connection will be shown between metacognition and self-assessments of tiredness. This study investigates the effects of 36 hours of sleep deprivation on psychomotor and cognitive tasks, self-assessments of tiredness and its connection to metacognitive assessments. Participants (N=6) were deprived of sleep for 36 hours in a controlled environment, in which we measured performance in a target pursuing task, RT task (simple and choice), attention task (a serial and parallel search), a ”face in the crowd” task with two emotions (happy and scared), a lexical decision task and a task of conditional reasoning. During deprivation, participants also performed self-assessments of tiredness (sleepiness, mental fatigue, physical fatigue), and also assessed (from worst to best) their success in all tasks all round before, and specifically after their completion. After a period of deprivation, participants rested for 8 hours, and then the tasks were repeated. Our main goal was to examine whether the assessment of success was connected to the performance of different tasks during deprivation, and its connection to self- assessments of tiredness. Our assumption was that participants would correctly assess their success in more simple tasks, due to the relatively simple meta-cognitive knowledge required in such situations. We also presumed that a connection exists between self- assessments of tiredness and assessments of success. The results show that there is a circadian rhythm effect on the performance of all tasks, and that rest also has a significant effect. A significant negative correlation can also be found between the self-assessment of tiredness and the assessment of success in almost all situations. Only the metacognitive assessment of the target pursuing task and the reaction time task showed no correlation with assessments of fatigue. The implications here are that assessments of tiredness are an important factor in metacognitive assessments during sleep deprivation. In the one dimension target pursuing task, the measurement of success was an average level of error, and the correlation with the specific assessment of success is significantly negative, which implies that participants estimated their success correctly. The results also show a significant negative correlation between the reaction time task and the specific assessment of success, which also shows, that in these tasks, participants estimated their scores correctly. In “the face in the crowd” tasks, attention tasks, and lexical decision tasks, no significant correlation was found in assessments of success. This suggests that participants could not correctly estimate their success. In the conditional reasoning task, the mistakes were numerous in the participants’ responses, which means that instead of reaction time, as an objective measure of success, analyses was provided for the number of correct recognitions: results showed that there was no significant correlation between this and the assessment of success. In conclusion, it can be said that participants can precisely assess theirs success in more simple tasks when depraved of sleep, but in more complex tasks they assessments, for the most part, wrong. A possible explanation here is that complexity interacted with tiredness.

metacognition ; sleep deprivation ; cognitive tasks

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