Chapter 18 - Economic decision-making and the sleep-deprived brain

Summary

An improved understanding of risky decision-making in sleep-deprived persons could have important real-world consequences. Traditional expectation-based models assume that individuals integrate information across outcomes and probabilities. Neuroeconomic studies that seek to understand the neural mechanisms underlying economic decision-making often target a particular decision variable, incorporate that variable into a model function, manipulate the level of that variable across a range of stimuli, and then identify aspects of brain function that track changes in that variable. Separating decision and outcome phases in the imaging analysis could also be important as sleep deprivation (SD) might interact with task context and feedback to influence neural responses and behavior. The shifts in economic preferences in the multiple outcome gambling experiment as well as relative valuation for social and monetary stimuli were independent of the effects of SD on psychomotor vigilance, consistent with the suggestion that effects of SD vary according to cognitive domain.