Sleep Deprivation And Decision Making

Sleep Deprivation and Decision Making The study, Feedback Blunting: Total Sleep Deprivation Impairs Decision Making that Requires Updating Based on Feedback , Whitney, PhD, P. et al (2014) examined the effects on people on their decision making after sleep deprivation. This study included testing at different stages of sleep conditions in a 62 hour period. Sleep deprived volunteers had issues with having to learn go and no-go stimuli tests and actually did worse when attempting the tests in reverse.
Skin conductance responses to outcome started to diminish which meant the volunteers started becoming blunt in their reactions due to sleep deprivation.
A total of twenty-six subjects were involved in this study. Half of the subjects had …show more content…
A go/no-go test is one that has a person respond to stimuli and based on that stimuli perform as action. For example, the participant will be shown a green box, and the requirement for that stimuli is that the participant is instructed to press a green “go” button. If performed in this succession, the test is a pass as far as getting the test correct. This study used go/no-go tests like this to measure the effects of sleep deprivation.
For example, a person had to push a button when they saw certain numbers or not push when they saw other numbers. These numbers are referred to as the stimuli. The group of subjects with normal sleeping periods did generally better than the sleep deprived group. When the test was reversed and the subjects were instructed to do the opposite for a given stimuli, the
Sleep Deprivation and Decision Making 3 gap in performance was significant. The sleep-deprived half were not able to get the tests right when instructed to do the opposite. This was performed 40 times and none of the sleep-deprived group were able to get the reverse test right. It seemed that their ability to absorb any