Publications by authors named "Nicholas Bathurst"

Objectives: Under laboratory settings, light exposure upon waking at night improves sleep inertia symptoms. We investigated whether a field-deployable light source would mitigate sleep inertia in a real-world setting.

Methods: Thirty-six participants (18 female; 26.

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Sleep inertia is the brief period of impaired alertness and performance experienced immediately after waking. Little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. A better understanding of the neural processes during sleep inertia may offer insight into the awakening process.

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Study Objectives: The influence of biological sex on sleep inertia symptoms is currently unknown. We investigated the role of sex differences in the subjective experience and objective cognitive manifestation of sleep inertia following nighttime awakenings.

Methods: Thirty-two healthy adults (16 female, 25.

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Sleep inertia is the brief period of performance impairment and reduced alertness experienced after waking, especially from slow-wave sleep. We assessed the efficacy of polychromatic short-wavelength-enriched light to improve vigilant attention, alertness and mood immediately after waking from slow-wave sleep at night. Twelve participants (six female, 23.

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Human error has been implicated as a causal factor in a large proportion of road accidents. Automated driving systems purport to mitigate this risk, but self-driving systems that allow a driver to entirely disengage from the driving task also require the driver to monitor the environment and take control when necessary. Given that sleep loss impairs monitoring performance and there is a high prevalence of sleep deficiency in modern society, we hypothesized that supervising a self-driving vehicle would unmask latent sleepiness compared to manually controlled driving among individuals following their typical sleep schedules.

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Lunar habitation and exploration of space beyond low-Earth orbit will require small crews to live in isolation and confinement while maintaining a high level of performance with limited support from mission control. Astronauts only achieve approximately 6 h of sleep per night, but few studies have linked sleep deficiency in space to performance impairment. We studied crewmembers over 45 days during a simulated space mission that included 5 h of sleep opportunity on weekdays and 8 h of sleep on weekends to characterize changes in performance on the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) and subjective fatigue ratings.

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Maritime piloting operations involve on-call work schedules that may lead to sleep loss and circadian misalignment. Our study documented pilot work scheduling practices (n = 61) over a one-year period. Most pilots worked a week-on/week-off schedule.

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