Effects of sleep loss, time of day, and extended mental work on implicit and explicit learning of sequences

Tacit knowledge is part of many professional skills and can be studied experimentally with implicit-learning paradigms. The authors explored the effects of 2 different stressors,loss of sleep and mental fatigue, on implicit learning in a serial-response time (RT) task. In the ist experiment, 1 night of sleep deprivation was shown to impair implicit but not explicit sequence learning. In the 2nd experiment, no impairment of both types of sequence learning was found after 1.5 hr of mental work. Serial-RT performance, in contrast, suffered from both stressors. These findings suggest that sleep deprivation induces specific risks for automatic, skill-based behavior that are not present in consciously controlled performance.