Adventures in Epistemology: a Scientifical Investigation

So these days at work I'm working with this study done by HCRC on sleep deprivation. Spread out across twelve CD's are six sets of thirty-nine dialogues, recorded from sessions where subjects were put in pairs of giver and follower and asked to give directions to each other based on simple maps. The subjects went upwards of 48 hours without sleep, becoming increasingly . While working with this material, I have been conducting my own experiments in sleep deprivation, varying the amount of sleep that the subject, Jackson Ferrell, receives each night, ranging anywhere from two to eight hours.
At the end of a two-week period, the subject's work performance was evaluated. The subject was asked to, from the CD materials provided, the structure of the HCRC experiment, determine the chronological order of the dialogue transcripts and audio files, and to determine at what points throughout the experiment the HCRC experiment subjects were instructed to read word lists consisting of the names of landmarks from the maps. The subject catalogued the files by CD, then ordered them chronologically, citing the name and number of each pair, noting which took the role of giver or follower, and the CD and subdirectory where the requisite files could be found, as well as the day and time of each session.
Double-checking the subject's catalog yielded surprising results. Subjects were frequently misidentified as giver or follower, subject ID numbers were transposed, and file locations often referred to files and directories that were not on the designated CD. Sometimes files were double-cited for additional incorrect pairs as well as the correct giver/follower pair. The subject, when asked, reported that he had felt "reasonably confident" in the accuracy of his notes, and that he approached the task with what he considered a sufficient level of attention to detail. Even while aware that he was operating under sleep-deprived conditions, the subject considered force of will and increased effort toward accuracy sufficient to overcome the effects of fatigue on cognitive function.
These findings suggest that those in a condition of error or increased susceptibility to error are generally unaware of their state, and consider themselves competent to accurately perceive and convey information at a normal level of functionality. Further studies would investigate the applicability of this hypothesis beyond the particular condition of sleep deprivation.