Where there any articles made about cognitive distortions caused by sleep deprivation? I mean failures in predictive processing, cognitive stuff, making more bias itd
Executive summary
Yes — there is a growing body of empirical literature showing that sleep deprivation produces measurable distortions in perception, attention, memory and decision-making, and several studies frame those effects as failures of hierarchical predictive processing or as weakened “priors” that make perception and inference more variable and biased [1] [2] [3]. At the same time, meta-analyses and reviews caution that the effects are broad and sometimes nonspecific, and mechanistic claims about predictive-processing failure remain an active area for targeted neural investigation [4] [5] [1].
1. Clear experimental evidence that sleep loss destabilizes perception and inference
Controlled experiments report that acute sleep deprivation reduces perceptual stability — subjects experience more visual distortions, illusions and somatosensory variability — and one recent experimental paper explicitly interprets those instabilities through the lens of hierarchical predictive-processing models, arguing that sleep loss may make low-level perceptual priors imprecise and thus increase perceptual volatility [1] [2].
2. Broad cognitive impairments documented across many domains
Beyond perceptual instability, systematic reviews and meta-analyses document consistent impairments in sustained attention, reaction time, memory consolidation, and executive control after sleep loss; these domain-general deficits are often large and reliable across studies, supporting the view that sleep deprivation degrades the neural substrate that underpins accurate prediction and control [4] [3] [6].
3. Neural and physiological mechanisms that could underwrite predictive failures
Work linking sleep loss to local “sleep-like” activity in cortical patches, reduced functional connectivity between prefrontal control regions and sensory areas, and altered neurovascular coupling provides plausible mechanistic routes by which priors and top‑down predictions might weaken — for example, reduced prefrontal control could fail to suppress noisy sensory inputs and so inflate prediction errors [1] [7] [8].
4. Evidence tying sleep disruption to psychosis‑like perceptual errors and bias
Several studies and longitudinal cohorts show that sleep disturbances correlate with psychotic‑like experiences or enhanced psychosis vulnerability in adolescents, and experimental work notes similarities between perceptual instability after sleep loss and patterns observed in psychosis-prone individuals, which researchers interpret as converging on disrupted predictive processing [1] [9].
5. Important caveats: nonspecific effects, methodological heterogeneity, and interpretive limits
Major reviews emphasize that sleep deprivation often produces a broad, nonspecific hit to cognition — vigilance and homeostatic sleep pressure are strong moderators — so not every deficit can be cleanly mapped to a predictive‑processing failure, and differences in tasks, subject history, and protocols complicate direct inference [4] [5]. The experimental predictive‑processing framing is compelling but still requires direct neural tests (local sleep in sensory streams, precision-weighting of priors) that many studies have yet to deliver [1].
6. Where the literature needs to go next
Authors themselves call for targeted neural investigations — fast fMRI/EEG to capture transient local slow waves, studies of neurochemical changes (adenosine, arousal systems), and manipulations of priors or expectations to test causality — and note that factors like light exposure, caffeine or circadian phase could modify whether predictive failures appear after sleep loss [1] [8] [7].
7. Competing narratives and vested interests in the reporting ecosystem
Some of the most cited papers are in open‑access venues (for instance an MDPI article licensed CC BY), which accelerates dissemination but also draws scrutiny about editorial models and hype; at the same time, large meta-analyses and conservative reviews published in established outlets temper bold mechanistic claims, so readers should weigh experimental framing against systematic‑review caution [1] [4] [5].
8. Bottom line for interpretation
The claim that sleep deprivation causes “cognitive distortions” by impairing predictive processing is well supported at a behavioral and phenomenological level and is increasingly anchored to physiological hypotheses (local sleep, connectivity, neurovascular change), but confirming the precise computational failure (e.g., degraded low‑level priors versus impaired precision‑weighting) requires more focused neural experiments and careful cross‑study synthesis [1] [7] [4].