MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Nicola Barclay, BA(Hons), MSc, PhD. Lecturer in Sleep Medicine Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi) Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences Sir William Dunn School of Pathology University of Oxford MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: We know that extreme sleep deprivation impairs our cognitive functions, particularly attention. This impairment in attention is likely to be driven by physiological mechanisms that change across the waking day (increasing sleep pressure), but also by factors associated with our biological clock. The timing of physiological processes particularly related to attention differ between morning and evening type people (our so called early morning larks and night owls), and so we hypothesised that morning and evening types would differ in their impairments in attention at different times of day, prior to and following 18 hours of sustained wakefulness. (more…)