Zehui Liu, Tian Xie, Ning Ma

Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education; Center for Sleep Research, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health & Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, People’s Republic of China

Correspondence: Ning Ma, Center for Sleep Research, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, People’s Republic of China, Email maning@m.scnu.edu.cn

Purpose: Sleep deprivation can induce severe deficits in vigilant maintenance and alternation in large-scale networks. However, differences in the dynamic brain networks after sleep deprivation across individuals have rarely been investigated. In the present study, we used EEG microstate analysis to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation and how it differentially affects resting-state brain activity in different individuals.
Participants and Methods: A total of 44 healthy adults participated in a within-participant design study involving baseline sleep and 24-hour sleep deprivation, with resting-state EEG recorded during wakefulness. The psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) was used to measure vigilant attention. Participants were median split as vulnerable or resilient according to their changes in the number of lapses between the baseline sleep and sleep deprivation conditions.
Results: Sleep deprivation caused decreases in microstates A, B, and D, and increases in microstate C. We also found increased transition probabilities of microstates C and D between each other, lower transition probabilities from microstates C and D to microstate B, and higher transition probabilities from microstates A and B to microstate C. Sleep-deprived vulnerable individuals showed decreased occurrence of microstate B and transition probability from microstate C to B after sleep deprivation, but not in resilient individuals.
Conclusion: The findings suggest that sleep deprivation critically affects dynamic brain-state properties and the differences in time parameters of microstates might be the underlying neural basis of interindividual vulnerability to sleep deprivation.

Keywords: sleep deprivation, electroencephalography, resting-state, microstates, vigilance, interindividual differences