Sleep Deprivation and Cognition

Dr. Paul Whitney is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Executive Director of the Health Equity Research Center at Washington State University, Pullman. He has published extensively on the cognitive neuroscience of working memory and executive functions in language comprehension and risky decision making. His recent research has focused on how the attentional control system can adapt to situational challenges, including sleep deprivation, in ways that produce resilient performance under fatigue and attentional overload.

Dr. John M. Hinson is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University, Pullman. Dr. Hinson is known for early work on optimality analysis of conditioning and learning, and for more recent research demonstrating how working memory functioning constrains experiential and descriptive decision making. His current research focuses on working memory and affective influences on decisions making, and is particularly concerned with understanding changes in attentional control processes that result from sleep loss.

Dr. Michael W.L. Chee is Professor and Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. He has extensively characterized functional neuroimaging changes occurring in sleep deprivation across multiple cognitive domains. This has been extended to studying effects of multi-night sleep restriction on adolescent cognition and mood as well as the modulatory effect of sleep on cognitive aging. He is investigating interventions to improve sleep including phase-locked acoustic stimulation and starting school later. He contributed to the development of a patented rapid sleep staging platform. He is a recipient of the National Outstanding Clinician Scientist award and the Singapore Translational Research award.

Dr. Kimberly A. Honn is an Assistant Research Professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State University, Spokane. Dr. Honn conducts laboratory sleep deprivation studies that are focused on investigating the specific cognitive impairments caused by sleep loss and the underlying neurobiological causes for such performance deficits. Her research also involves field studies of sleep and performance during different shift schedules within the transportation industry, including commercial trucking and aviation.

Dr. Hans P. A. Van Dongen is Director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center and Professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State University Spokane. Dr. Van Dongen is known for his research on sleep, sleep deprivation, shift work, cognitive performance, and fatigue risk management. His research includes laboratory, field, and simulator studies, as well as mathematical modeling of sleep and performance. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, is a named inventor on two U.S. patents, and is an elected member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences.