Cytokines such as TNFα play an integral role in sleep/wake regulation and have recently been hypothesized to be involved in cognitive impairment due to sleep deprivation. We examined the effect of a guanine to adenine substitution at position 308 in the TNFα gene (TNFα G308A) on psychomotor vigilance performance impairment during total sleep deprivation. A total of 88 healthy women and men (age...

Predators alter prey dynamics by direct killing and through the costs of antipredator responses or risk effects. Antipredator behavior includes proactive responses to long-term variation in risk (e.g., grouping patterns) and reactive responses to short-term variation in risk (e.g., intense vigilance). In a 3-year field study, we measured variation in antipredator responses and the foraging cost...

Altered vigilance performance has been documented in patients with sleep-related breathing disorders (SRBDs). Sleep fragmentation, sleepiness, respiratory disturbances and nocturnal hypoxaemia have been suggested as the pathogenesis of these deficits, yet it remains difficult to find a good correlation between performance deficits and the above factors. In the present study, which performance m...

Adrenal hormones likely affect anti-predator behavior in animals. With experimental field studies, we first investigated associations between mean fecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGC) excretion and vigilance and with behavioral responses to alarm call playbacks in free-ranging meerkats (Suricata suricatta). We then tested how vigilance and behavioral responses to alarm call playbacks were affe...

BACKGROUND During routine cases, anesthesia providers may divert their attention away from direct patient care to read clinical (e.g., medical records) and/or nonclinical materials. The authors sought to ascertain the incidence of intraoperative reading and measure its effects on clinicians' workload and vigilance. METHODS In 172 selected general anesthetic cases in an academic medical center...

Binaural beats are an auditory phenomenon that has been suggested to alter physiological and cognitive processes including vigilance and brainwave entrainment. Some personality traits measured by the NEO Five Factor Model have been found to alter entrainment using pulsing light stimuli, but as yet no studies have examined if this occurs using steady state presentation of binaural beats for a re...

Most, if not all, animals are highly responsive organisms that are capable of adjusting their behaviour during the course of their interactions with others [1]. This observation may seem obvious, yet evolutionary theory has traditionally modelled cooperation and conflict as a ‘sealed bid’, assuming that both parties decide on a fixed strategy without any knowledge of the other’s behaviour [2]. ...

This study aims to assess the vigilance task-related change in connectivity in healthy adults using wavelet phase coherence (WPCO) analysis of near-infrared spectroscopy signals (NIRS). NIRS is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique for assessing brain activity. Continuous recordings of the NIRS signals were obtained from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and sensorimotor cortical areas of 20 young he...

BACKGROUND It is well known that individual factors are important in the facial recognition of pain. However, it is unclear whether vigilance to pain as a pain-related attentional mechanism is among these relevant factors. OBJECTIVES Vigilance to pain may have two different effects on the recognition of facial pain expressions: pain-vigilant individuals may detect pain faces better but overin...

Eye movements were used as a criterion of observing responses in a vigilance task. Time on watch and signal rates similarly affected both eye-movement rates and percentage of detections. Observing rate may account for detection data, and may be a more stable measure of vigilance than detection rate is, especially when very few signals occur.