Finally, some good news related to fatigue

NEWSLETTER ARTICLE

In a literature review, noted human factors scholar Christopher Wickens' discovered that while sleep disruption does degrade cognitive task performance, the degradation is not as severe as it is for simpler tasks (Wickens, Christopher D., Shaun D. Hutchins, Lila Laux, and Angelia Sebok, "The Impact of Sleep Disruption on Complex Cognitive Tasks: A Meta-Analysis" Human Factors 57.6 (2015): 930-946).

This is true for sleep reduction and circadian induced deprivation. However, simpler tasks include such things as vigilance (detecting a problem) and attention-switching (focusing on a new problem). So while console operators who are fatigued may not be as much at risk for not being able to diagnose an upset as we once thought, they will still be less likely to detect the upset than a non-fatigued operator.

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