The effects of one night of sleep deprivation on known‐risk and ambiguous‐risk decisions

Abstract

Summary 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.

Sleepiness, choice consistency, and risk preferences

“…The Table 6 result is therefore consistent with the hypothesis that mismatched subjects take more risks because they are more desensitized to risk, which is a result reported previously in the literature using totally sleep deprived subjects (McKenna et al, 2007).…”

“…This result is consistent with other literature examining extreme forms of temporary cognitive resource depletion effects on incentivized risky choice tasks, such as total sleep deprivation (e.g., McKenna et al, 2007) or intoxication (e.g., Lane et al, 2004). Importantly, despite the shift in risk attitudes, we do not find any significant difference in decision-making rationality resulting from circadian mismatch, under several alternative definitions of consistency.…”

“…In controlled experiment settings, researchers have found that sleep deprived individuals take on more risk than well-rested individuals when choosing between risky lotteries (McKenna et al, 2007). In a different risky choice task, Venkatraman et al, (2007) found neural effects in sleep-deprived subjects even in the absence of behavioral effects.…”

Reward-Seeking Behavior in Human Narcolepsy

“…36,37 Interestingly, the rates of depression and anxiety were higher in subjects with N+C than those with N-C. 38 …”

“…In contrast, healthy sleep deprived subjects have shown increased risk-taking on various gambling tasks and questionnaires, such as the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS), the Evaluation of Risk (EVAR) scale, and the BART. 38,40,41 Possibly, sleepiness also increases risk-taking behavior in narcolepsy with cataplexy, but this effect is masked by their hypocretin deficiency. However, this would not explain the findings in the non-hypocretin deficient narcolepsy without cataplexy group.…”