Different Types of Errors in Saccadic Task Are Sensitive to Either Time of Day or Chronic Sleep Restriction

Circadian rhythms and restricted sleep length affect cognitive functions and, consequently, the performance of day to day activities. To date, no more than a few studies have explored the consequences of these factors on oculomotor behaviour. We have implemented a spatial cuing paradigm in an eye tracking experiment conducted four times of the day after one week of rested wakefulness and after one week of chronic partial sleep restriction. Our aim was to verify whether these conditions affect the number of a variety of saccadic task errors. Interestingly, we found that failures in response selection, i.e. premature responses and direction errors, were prone to time of day variations, whereas failures in response execution, i.e. omissions and commissions, were considerably affected by sleep deprivation. The former can be linked to the cue facilitation mechanism, while the latter to wake state instability and the diminished ability of top-down inhibition. Together, these results may be interpreted in terms of distinctive sensitivity of orienting and alerting systems to fatigue. Saccadic eye movements proved to be a novel and effective measure with which to study the susceptibility of attentional systems to time factors, thus, this approach is recommended for future research.