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Abstract
A night of total sleep deprivation (TSD) impairs selective attention and is accompanied by attenuated activation within ventral visual cortex (VVC). However, finer details of how TSD compromises selectivity of visual processing remain unclear. Drawing from prior work in cognitive aging, we predicted that TSD would result in dedifferentiation of neural responses for faces and houses within the VVC. Instead, we found preservation of category selectivity. This was observed both in voxels highly selective for each category, and also across multiple voxels evaluated using MVPA. Based on prior findings of impaired attentional modulation following TSD, we also predicted reduced biasing of neural representations towards the attended category when participants viewed ambiguous face/house images. When participants were well rested, attention to houses (or faces) caused activation patterns to more closely resemble those elicited by isolated house (face) images than face (house) images. During TSD, attention to faces enhanced neural similarity to both target (face) and distractor (house) representations, signifying reduced suppression of irrelevant information. Degraded sensory processing reflected in reduced VVC activation following TSD, thus appears to be a result of impaired top-down modulation of sensory representations instead of degraded selectivity of maximally category sensitive voxels, or the dedifferentiation of neural activation patterns.
Highlights
A night of total sleep deprivation (TSD) impairs selective attention and is accompanied by attenuated activation within ventral visual cortex (VVC)
Extending results of prior work, we found that attention to faces in ambiguous images enhanced neural similarity to both target and distractor representations in TSD, signifying impaired ability to ignore competing information
Attenuated activation of the ventral visual cortex of sleep-deprived persons has been repeatedly observed[1,2,3,17] and resembles similar observations in older adults[18,19]. These latter observations support a theoretical framework wherein impaired sensory processing contributes to deficits found in cognitive aging[19,20,21,22] by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of perceptual representations[9,23]
Summary
A night of total sleep deprivation (TSD) impairs selective attention and is accompanied by attenuated activation within ventral visual cortex (VVC). In light of these findings, we predicted that we would find degraded sensory representation following TSD in the form of dedifferentiated VVC responses, either in individual category-selective voxels, or in altered neural activation patterns.
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