Cognitive exertion affects the appraisal of one's own and other people's pain.

Correctly evaluating others' pain is a crucial prosocial ability. In both clinical and private settings, caregivers assess their other people's pain, sometimes under the effect of poor sleep and high workload and fatigue. However, the effect played by such cognitive strain in the appraisal of others' pain remains unclear.

Impact of sleep deprivation on attentional networks: disentangling orienting components.

While it is well accepted that sleep deprivation (SD) negatively affects overall vigilance and performance, research on the extent to which SD affects discrete components of attention has produced inconsistent results. The present study aims at exploring the effects of SD on attentional components and their interactions using the revised attentional network test (ANT-R) which allows to examine the three attentional networks: alerting, orienting and executive control. Additionally, it allows the evaluation of subcomponents of orienting.

Individual differences in working memory efficiency modulate proactive interference after sleep deprivation.

Whether and how sleep loss affects executive functioning are still under debate. In this study, we examined the role of individual differences in determining the levels of working memory (WM) efficiency and proactive interference (PI) after sleep deprivation. Fifty-two participants performed a test battery included a modified Sternberg task and the Jonides' 2-back task under two sleep conditions: baseline (BL, a night of regular sleep), and total sleep deprivation (SD, 24 h of wakefulness).