Watch out! Lack of sleep can slow you down

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, have found that regardless of how tired you think you are, lack of sleep can influence the way you do certain tasks.

"Our team decided to look at how sleep might affect complex visual search tasks because they are common in safety-sensitive activities such as air-traffic control, baggage screening and monitoring power plants," Jeanne F. Duffy at BWH was quoted as saying in the The Journal of Vision.

"These types of jobs involve processes that require repeated, quick memory encoding and retrieval of visual information, in combination with decision making about the information," added Duffy.

Researchers collected and analysed data from visual search tasks from a group of participants over one month's study. In the first week, all participants were scheduled to sleep 10-12 hours per night to make sure they were well rested.