Effect Of 32H Sleep Deprivation On The Ability Of Mental Rotation

Flying career is such a kind of job that is very complicated and needs a high level of mental and physical load. It makes demands of pilots to have higher ability of mental working. As is well known, a sufficient sleep is the necessity for pilots to have good performances. However, there are so many reasons that can lead to the deprivation of sleep and cause the decrease of quality of sleep, such as, night navigation at peacetime or wartime, long-distance flight and battle stresses. And these factors can be common in the circumstance of future high-tech war. Sleep deprivation is one of the reasons of which result in severe flying fatigue. It has reported by in America that near 93 percent of pilots experienced flying fatigue, and 10 percent of the mortality in battle field has the relation with flying fatigue. So, the blight of sleep deprivation on human being has been highlighted the research field.It is testified that the ability of spatial cognition is indispensable trait to a pilot. Visual imagery, which is one of the subsystems of the ability of spatial cognition, can be transferred in many ways, and the most typical way is mental rotation based on imagery.The purpose of our study is to discuss the effect of 32h sleep deprivation on the ability of mental rotation. And we hope it can give advice to flying administration rationally arrange the sleep of pilot at peacetime or wartime to make better performances.There are three parts as follows:Experiment one: To discuss the effect of verbal ability on the ability of mental rotation and present evidences to further experiments. Experiment two: To analyze the relationship between rotation angle with reaction time during 32h sleep deprivation and discuss the effect of sleep deprivation on the whole processing procedure of mental rotation; Experiment three: To study the effect of 32h sleep deprivation on the performance of mental rotation.The main conclusions:1. Verbal ability has no relation with the ability of mental rotation, and in the further study, verbal ability may not be taken as a factor to affect the ability of mental rotation when the subjects have the same gender (male).2. During 32h sleep deprivation, rotation angle has positive relation with reaction time, and the whole processing procedure of mental rotation is not affected by sleep deprivation.3. Sleep deprivation has a certain influence on the performance of mental rotation. During 32h sleep deprivation, the longer the subjects were deprived, the worse performance they had, especially at night time(SD20h - SD24h). The worst performance emerges when the subjects were deprived for 24h.