ABSTRACT
The effects of CX717 (cortex Pharmaceuticals) appear to be specific to preserving high levels of performance under the stressful conditions of accumulated sleep loss and provide a potential viable means of sustaining or recovering critical functions when sleep deprivation is unavoidable. CX717 was also effective in enhancing Delayed-Match-to-Sample (DMS) performance under normal alert conditions, therefore its potential to reverse the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation may result from a general enhancement of performance without necessarily reversing alertness in the same manner as amphetamine, caffeine or modafinil. It can be seen that amphetamine, caffeine and modafinil did not produce the same degree of reversal of DMS performance as CX717, even though all drugs enhanced high cognitive load trials, only CX717 enhanced low cognitive load trials. The authors have also used the nonhuman primate model to explore different techniques for assessing performance and cognitive workload—namely behavioral, electrophysiological, occulometric, and brain metabolic assessment via positron-emission tomography.
