Compensating effects of operator fatigue due to sleep loss through collaborative team work in a control room situation

Kurzfassung

Objectives/Introduction: Sleep deprivation is associated with impaired individual cognitive performance. Although team performance is also widely common in occupational settings requiring adverse working times, research on the effects of fatigue on team performance is scarce. We investigated how sleep deprivation affects team performance in a simulated control room expecting that operators’ performance is less deteriorated by fatigue when collaborating in a cooperative team than when working alone. Methods: Sixty-six healthy volunteers (32 females, mean age ± SD: 26 ± 5 years) were randomly assigned to small groups of 3 members and underwent a sleep laboratory study for 5 consecutive days. Each participant performed a simulated control room task including a monitoring task (monitoring for system failures requiring sustained attention) and a diagnosis task (identifying the cause of system failures by logical reasoning) once during daytime after 1 h of wakefulness (baseline), and once during the circadian low after 19 h of wakefulness (sleep deprivation). Three team conditions (solo, i.e. working alone, cooperative team, competitive team) were applied. Results: In the monitoring task, mixed-model analysis showed slower reaction times and less accuracy under sleep deprivation than during baseline (both p < .001), and faster responses, but less accuracy in the solo condition than in both team conditions (both p < .001). There was no interaction between sleep and team condition for both performance indicators. In the diagnosis task, participants were slower when sleep deprived compared to baseline (p < .001), and in both team conditions compared to solo (both, p < .001). There was a significant interaction effect between sleep and cooperative team condition for accuracy (p < .001), but not for the competitive team condition and not for speed. In contrast to solo work participants in the cooperative team condition were even more accurate under sleep deprivation than during baseline. Conclusions: Sleep deprivation combined with an adverse time of day affects not only individual performance, but also team performance in a control room simulation. Though team work was associated with longer response times than solo work, working collaboratively on a task appears to protect against some effects of fatigue on logical reasoning.