Sleep Deprivation with and Without Stimulant Use Exposesdistinct Dimensions of Cognition

Introduction: Stimulants are commonly used as countermeasures to sleep loss-induced performance impairment in operational settings. People show substantial interindividual variability in vulnerability to sleep loss, and this variability is task-dependent. Limited prior evidence suggests that caffeine and modafinil, stimulants that act through adenosinergic and dopaminergic systems, respectively, may differentially affect interindividual and task-dependent differences. As a first analysis to investigate this, we assessed whether the dimensions of cognition underlying task-dependent performance during total sleep deprivation (TSD) are conserved with caffeine and modafinil during a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled TSD in-laboratory study.