The effects of 24-hour sleep deprivation on the exploration–exploitation trade-off (original) (raw)
Related papers
Impaired decision making following 49 h of sleep deprivation
Journal of Sleep Research, 2006
Sleep deprivation reduces regional cerebral metabolism within the prefrontal cortex, the brain region most responsible for higher-order cognitive processes, including judgment and decision making. Accordingly, we hypothesized that two nights of sleep loss would impair decision making quality and lead to increased risk-taking behavior on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), which mimics real-world decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Thirty-four healthy participants completed the IGT at rested baseline and again following 49.5 h of sleep deprivation. At baseline, volunteers performed in a manner similar to that seen in most samples of healthy normal individuals, rapidly learning to avoid high-risk decks and selecting more frequently from advantageous lowrisk decks as the game progressed. After sleep loss, however, volunteers showed a strikingly different pattern of performance. Relative to rested baseline, sleep-deprived individuals tended to choose more frequently from risky decks as the game progressed, a pattern similar to, though less severe than, previously published reports of patients with lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Although risky decision making was not related to participant age when tested at rested baseline, age was negatively correlated with advantageous decision making on the IGT, when tested following sleep deprivation (i.e. older subjects made more risky choices). These findings suggest that cognitive functions known to be mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, including decision making under conditions of uncertainty, may be particularly vulnerable to sleep loss and that this vulnerability may become more pronounced with increased age.
Sleep Deprivation and Decision Making-Whitney et al. The effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is not uniform. 1 In laboratory studies, sleep deprivation has consistently been shown to substantially degrade vigilance and sustained attention, whereas its effects on demanding tests of complex cognition such as decision making appear to be inconsistent and relatively small. 2,3 Paradoxically, in the natural environment there are well-documented deficits in decision making due to sleep deprivation. 4,5 In emergency response, disaster management, military encounters, and other fast-paced situations with uncertain outcomes and imperfect information, good decision making is significantly hampered by sleep deprivation. Although the lapses of sustained attention that are characteristic of sleep deprivation contribute to errors and accidents, 3,8 attentional lapses are not the whole story of sleep deprivation effects on naturalistic decision making. The laboratory tasks often used to examine sleep deprivation effects on decisions typically do not include elements of updating information over Study Objectives: To better understand the sometimes catastrophic effects of sleep loss on naturalistic decision making, we investigated effects of sleep deprivation on decision making in a reversal learning paradigm requiring acquisition and updating of information based on outcome feedback. Design: Subjects were randomized to a sleep deprivation or control condition, with performance testing at baseline, after 2 nights of total sleep deprivation (or rested control), and following 2 nights of recovery sleep. Subjects performed a decision task involving initial learning of go and no go response sets followed by unannounced reversal of contingencies, requiring use of outcome feedback for decisions. A working memory scanning task and psychomotor vigilance test were also administered. Setting: Six consecutive days and nights in a controlled laboratory environment with continuous behavioral monitoring. Subjects: Twenty-six subjects (22-40 y of age; 10 women). Interventions: Thirteen subjects were randomized to a 62-h total sleep deprivation condition; the others were controls. Results: Unlike controls, sleep deprived subjects had difficulty with initial learning of go and no go stimuli sets and had profound impairment adapting to reversal. Skin conductance responses to outcome feedback were diminished, indicating blunted affective reactions to feedback accompanying sleep deprivation. Working memory scanning performance was not significantly affected by sleep deprivation. And although sleep deprived subjects showed expected attentional lapses, these could not account for impairments in reversal learning decision making. Conclusions: Sleep deprivation is particularly problematic for decision making involving uncertainty and unexpected change. Blunted reactions to feedback while sleep deprived underlie failures to adapt to uncertainty and changing contingencies. Thus, an error may register, but with diminished effect because of reduced affective valence of the feedback or because the feedback is not cognitively bound with the choice. This has important implications for understanding and managing sleep loss-induced cognitive impairment in emergency response, disaster management, military operations, and other dynamic real-world settings with uncertain outcomes and imperfect information.
Sleep choice and circadian mismatch affects strategic reasoning
The ability to strategically reason is important many competitive environments. Trait-level cognitive skills have been shown to affect strategic behavior, but important temporal variations in state-level cognition are not uncommon. A common source of state-level cognition variability is sleepiness, which may result from sleep loss or circadian timing. We examine ecologically valid sleep and circadian effects on strategic reasoning, using a task that engages controlled thought areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (1) associated with mentalizing. Our first result is that that voluntary sleep loss, as well as relatively mild circadian mismatch, harms subjects' strategic reasoning. However, a second results is that choice evolution during repeated play is resilient, which is consistent with the hypothesis that automatic thought is more resilient to cognitive resource depletion than controlled thought processes (2). These results demonstrate that even relatively mild levels of voluntary sleep loss, as well as adverse (but not extreme) times of day, can produce decrements in strategic reasoning that may harm successful adaptation to new competitive environments. Further analysis of our data also reveals evidence that higherthan-average levels of sleep harm strategic reasoning similar to low sleep levels, indicating that strategic reasoning is not monotonically improving in one's level of sleep. These results suggest that current trends in sleep habits and scheduling may be maladaptive and lead to suboptimal choices in decision environments where anticipation is important, such as in financial markets, driving commute choice, and threat assessment.
Scientific reports, 2017
Insufficient sleep is a global public health problem resulting in catastrophic accidents, increased mortality, and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity. Yet the effect of sleep deprivation (SD) on decision making and performance is often underestimated by fatigued individuals and is only beginning to be understood by scientists. The deleterious impact of SD is frequently attributed to lapses in vigilant attention, but this account fails to explain many SD-related problems, such as loss of situational awareness and perseveration. Using a laboratory study protocol, we show that SD individuals can maintain information in the focus of attention and anticipate likely correct responses, but their use of such a top-down attentional strategy is less effective at preventing errors caused by competing responses. Moreover, when the task environment requires flexibility, performance under SD suffers dramatically. The impairment in flexible shifting of attentional control we obse...
Insufficient sleep: Enhanced risk-seeking relates to low local sleep intensity
Annals of Neurology
Objectives: Chronic sleep restriction is highly prevalent in modern society and is in its clinical form, insufficient sleep syndrome, one of the most prevalent diagnoses in clinical sleep laboratories, with substantial negative impact on health and community burden. It reflects everyday sleep loss better than acute sleep deprivation, but its effects and particularly the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown for a variety of critical cognitive domains, as for example risky decision-making. Methods: We assessed financial risk-taking behavior after 7 consecutive nights of sleep restriction and after one night of acute sleep deprivation compared to a regular sleep condition in a within-subject design. We further investigated potential underlying mechanisms of sleep loss induced changes in behavior by high-density electroencephalography recordings during restricted sleep. Results: We show that chronic sleep restriction increases risk-seeking, while this was not observed after acute sleep deprivation. This increase was subjectively not noticed and was related to locally lower values of slow wave energy during preceding sleep, an electrophysiological marker of sleep intensity and restoration, in electrodes over the right prefrontal cortex. Interpretation: This study provides for the first time evidence that insufficient sleep restoration over circumscribed cortical areas leads to aberrant behavior. In chronically sleep restricted subjects, low slow wave sleep intensity over the right prefrontal cortex-which has been shown to be linked to risk behavior-may lead to increased and subjectively unnoticed risk-seeking.
Biology of Sport
One night of sleep deprivation INTRODUCTION Sleep loss affects motor and cognitive performance, the immune system, and emotional and physical well-being [1, 2]. From an epistemological point of view, sleep loss may play a role in the increased prevalence of diabetes and/or obesity [3]. Sleep deprivation increases homeostatic sleep drive and degrades waking neurobehavioral functions, as reflected in sleepiness (the condition of being in a drowsy state due to lack of sleep) and impaired attention, cognitive speed and memory [4]. However, other researchers have shown that performance of complex cognitive tasks may not be impacted by disrupted sleep as severely as that of simple cognitive tasks [5, 6]. Sleepiness differs from fatigue, which is characterized by a decline in performance capacity during physical work and depends on both central and peripheral mechanisms [7, 8]. Prolonged and/or intense stimulation of the central nervous system may produce conscious awareness of fatigue, which contributes to cognitive and emotional disturbances [9, 10] and a reduced ability to activate muscles [11]. A previous study concluded that the psychomotor vigilance test of simple reaction time (RT) is a reliable outcome metric for
Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation - SIN- 2009
Sleep deprivation is associated with considerable social, financial, and healthrelated costs, in large measure because it produces impaired cognitive performance due to increasing sleep propensity and instability of waking neurobehavioral functions. Cognitive functions particularly affected by sleep loss include psychomotor and cognitive speed, vigilant and executive attention, working memory, and higher cognitive abilities. Chronic sleep-restriction experiments-which model the kind of sleep loss experienced by many individuals with sleep fragmentation and premature sleep curtailment due to disorders and lifestyle-demonstrate that cognitive deficits accumulate to severe levels over time without full awareness by the affected individual. Functional neuroimaging has revealed that frequent and progressively longer cognitive lapses, which are a hallmark of sleep deprivation, involve distributed changes in brain regions including frontal and parietal control areas, secondary sensory processing areas, and thalamic areas. There are robust differences among individuals in the degree of their cognitive vulnerability to sleep loss that may involve differences in prefrontal and parietal cortices, and that may have a basis in genes regulating sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythms. Thus, cognitive deficits believed to be a function of the severity of clinical sleep disturbance may be a product of genetic alleles associated with differential cognitive vulnerability to sleep loss.
The effects of one night of sleep deprivation on known-risk and ambiguous-risk decisions
Journal of Sleep Research, 2007
Sleep deprivation has been shown to alter decision-making abilities. The majority of research has utilized fairly complex tasks with the goal of emulating 'real-life' scenarios. Here, we use a Lottery Choice Task (LCT) which assesses risk and ambiguity preference for both decisions involving potential gains and those involving potential losses. We hypothesized that one night of sleep deprivation would make subjects more risk seeking in both gains and losses. Both a control group and an experimental group took the LCT on two consecutive days, with an intervening night of either sleep or sleep deprivation. The control group demonstrated that there was no effect of repeated administration of the LCT. For the experimental group, results showed significant interactions of night (normal sleep versus total sleep deprivation, TSD) by frame (gains versus losses), which demonstrate that following as little as 23 h of TSD, the prototypical response to decisions involving risk is altered. Following TSD, subjects were willing to take more risk than they ordinarily would when they were considering a gain, but less risk than they ordinarily would when they were considering a loss. For ambiguity preferences, there seems to be no direct effect of TSD. These findings suggest that, overall, risk preference is moderated by TSD, but whether an individual is willing to take more or less risk than when well-rested depends on whether the decision is framed in terms of gains or losses.
A Local, Bottom-Up Perspective on Sleep Deprivation and Neurobehavioral Performance
Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry, 2011
Waking neurobehavioral performance is temporally regulated by a sleep/wake homeostatic process and a circadian process in interaction with a time-on-task effect. Neurobehavioral impairment resulting from these factors is task-specific, and characterized by performance variability. Several aspects of these phenomena are not well understood, and cannot be explained solely by a top-down (subcortically driven) view of sleep/wake and performance regulation. We present a bottom-up theory, where we postulate that task performance is degraded by local, usedependent sleep in neuronal groups subserving cognitive processes associated with the task at hand. The theory offers explanations for the temporal dependence of neurobehavioral performance on time awake, time on task, and their interaction; for the effectiveness of task switching and rest breaks to overcome the time-on-task effect (but not the effects of sleep deprivation); for the taskspecific nature of neurobehavioral impairment; and for the stochastic property of performance variability.