The 3-Minute Psychomotor Vigilance Test Demonstrates Inadequate Convergent Validity Relative to the 10-Minute Psychomotor Vigilance Test Across Sleep Loss and Recovery

The Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) is a widely used behavioral attention measure, with the 10-min (PVT-10) and 3-min (PVT-3) as two commonly used versions. The PVT-3 may be comparable to the PVT-10, though its convergent validity relative to the PVT-10 has not been explicitly assessed. For the first time, we utilized repeated measures correlation (rmcorr) to evaluate intra-individual associations between PVT-10 and PVT-3 versions across total sleep deprivation (TSD), chronic sleep restriction (SR) and multiple consecutive days of recovery. Eighty-three healthy adults (mean ± SD, 34.7 ± 8.9 years; 36 females) received two baseline nights (B1-B2), five SR nights (SR1-SR5), 36 h TSD, and four recovery nights (R1-R4) between sleep loss conditions. The PVT-10 and PVT-3 were completed every 2 h during wakefulness. Rmcorr compared responses on two frequently used, sensitive PVT metrics: reaction time (RT) via response speed (1/RT) and lapses (RT > 500 ms on the PVT-10 and > 355 ms on the PVT-3) by day (e.g., B2), by study phase (e.g., SR1-SR5), and by time point (1000–2000 h). PVT 1/RT correlations were generally stronger than those for lapses. The majority of correlations (48/50 [96%] for PVT lapses and 38/50 [76%] for PVT 1/RT) were values below 0.70, indicating validity issues. Overall, the PVT-3 demonstrated inadequate convergent validity with the “gold standard” PVT-10 across two different types of sleep loss and across extended recovery. Thus, the PVT-3 is not interchangeable with the PVT-10 for assessing behavioral attention performance during sleep loss based on the design of our study and the metrics we evaluated. Our results have substantial implications for design and measure selection in laboratory and applied settings, including those involving sleep deprivation.