The Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Attention-Sensitive Theta and Alpha Brain Oscillatory Activity

The present work explores the effect of sleep deprivation on visual attention. It focuses more specifically on the attention sensitive theta and alpha brain oscillations. They are stud-ied during a detection task performed before sleep deprivation (first day) and after sleep deprivation (second day). The task is a modified version of the Attention Network Test (ANT), which explores the alerting, orienting and executive control components of attention. Changes in theta and alpha oscillatory activity are compared before and after sleep depriva-tion for each component of attention. Nineteen healthy volunteers participated in the study..