Changes in individual alpha and delta power were also found to be related to changes in subjective sleepiness and PVT performance. EEG results showed a significant reduction in resting state alpha oscillations that was most prominent centrally in the right hemisphere. AB performance was unaffected by sleep restriction, despite clearly observable changes in brain activity. Study 2 sought to determine the neural underpinnings of the phenomenon, using electroencephalogram (EEG) frequency analysis, which measured activity during the brief eyes-closed resting state before the tasks. PVT performance, but not performance on the AB task, was impaired after sleep restriction. Study 1 compared performance on a sustained attention task (Psychomotor Vigilance task PVT) with performance on a transient attention task (Attentional Blink AB). This was achieved using a repeated-measures within-subjects design, with two contrasting conditions: normal sleep and partial sleep restriction of 5-h. Two studies examined whether discrete areas of attention are equally affected by sleep loss. Sleep is one of our most important physiological functions that maintains physical and mental health. The impact of sleep loss on sustained and transient attention: an EEG study. Cite this article Shenfield L, Beanland V, Filtness A, Apthorp D. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. Licence This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. 6 Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia DOI 10.7717/peerj.8960 Published Accepted Received Academic Editor Stefano Ferraina Subject Areas Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Psychology Keywords Sleep, EEG, Attention, Sustained attention, Transient attention, Sleep restriction, Attentional blink, PVT, Alpha EEG, Delta EEG Copyright © 2020 Shenfield et al.