Project Summary Collaborative Research: DRU: Behavioral and Neural Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Specific Components of Decision Making Drummond,Sean University of California-San Diego
This research combines efforts from the fields of sleep, cognitive neuroscience, and experimental economics. This project will examine the impact of multiple types of sleep deprivation on specific components of decision making. The research will examine changes in behavioral performance and brain function during decision after sleep deprivation. A well-controlled laboratory-based sleep deprivation study will examine both 26 hours of total sleep deprivation (no sleep at all) and 6 nights of partial sleep deprivation (some, but insufficient, sleep each night) relative to a well-rested condition. Subjects will perform decision tasks designed to assess a) risk preference, b) information integration, c) probability weighting, and d) value processing during decision making. Brain function during performance will be measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. To determine the extent to which these laboratory findings can be generalized to the type of sleep deprivation experienced in the ?real world?, the PIs will conduct studies at two separate undergraduate institutions. These two studies will objectively track the sleep (and other factors) of a relatively large number of undergraduates for a week each and then administer the decision tasks. Students at these schools average 4-7 hours of sleep each night. By studying an ecologically natural range of sleep times outside the laboratory, one can determine if this type of sleep loss produces similar behavioral changes (and presumably, brain function changes) as seen in the laboratory. These experiments recreate fundamental tasks that are at the very core of countless real-world decisions, such as financial or medical decisions or evaluating environmental risks. Together, the three studies will provide rich information concerning the effects of sleep deprivation on decision making and seek to directly evaluate the extent to which laboratory-controlled findings can generalize to a real-world model of sleep deprivation.
