Chapter 9 - Individual differences in cognitive vulnerability to fatigue in the laboratory and in the workplace

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Abstract

Individual differences in cognitive functioning during extended work hours and shift work are of considerable magnitude, and observed both in the laboratory and in the workplace. These individual differences have a biological basis in trait-like, differential vulnerability to fatigue from sleep loss and circadian misalignment. Trait-like vulnerability is predicted in part by gene polymorphisms and other biological or psychological characteristics, but for the larger part it remains unexplained. A complicating factor is that whether individuals are vulnerable or resilient to sleep deprivation depends on the fatigue measure considered—subjective versus objective assessment, or one cognitive task versus another. Such dissociation has been observed in laboratory data published previously, and in data from a simulated operational setting first presented here. Discordance between subjective and objective measures of fatigue has been documented in various contexts, and may be one of the reasons why vulnerable individuals do not systematically opt out of professions involving high cognitive demands and exposure to fatigue. Discordance in vulnerability to fatigue among different measures of cognitive performance may be related to the “task impurity problem,” which implies that interrelated cognitive processes involved in task performance must be distinguished before overall performance outcomes can be fully understood. Experimental studies and cognitive and computational modeling approaches are currently being employed to address the task impurity problem and gain new insights into individual vulnerability to fatigue across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This ongoing research is driving progress in the management of risks to safety and productivity associated with vulnerability to cognitive impairment from fatigue in the workplace.

Section snippets

Trait individual differences in vulnerability to fatigue

Individual differences in tolerance for, adaptation to, and impairment from extended work hours and shift work have been documented across a range of operational settings (Gillberg and Åkerstedt, 1985, Härmä, 1995, Monk and Folkard, 1985). Evidence is accumulating that these individual differences may have a biological basis (Van Dongen, 2006), involving differences in vulnerability to fatigue (sleepiness, loss of alertness) due to sleep deprivation and circadian misalignment. Fatigue is

Individual differences in vulnerability to fatigue in operational settings

The existence of trait-like individual differences in vulnerability to fatigue may be crucially important for workers in 24/7 operational settings, such as medical personnel (Czeisler, 2009), first responders (Lammers-van der Holst et al., 2006), and aviators (Caldwell et al., 2008). However, it is not a priori evident that laboratory-based assessments of individual variability translate reliably to the workplace. In populations that are highly trained and also frequently exposed to extended

New research into distinct cognitive dimensions of vulnerability to fatigue

The curious finding that systematic individual differences in vulnerability to sleep loss depend on the outcome measure at hand, both in a highly controlled study of healthy young adults from the general population using laboratory measures of performance and fatigue (Van Dongen et al., 2004a) and in a simulator study of highly selected, active-duty jet fighter pilots using high-fidelity simulated flight performance measures (Van Dongen et al., 2006), suggests that there is much to learn yet

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