Xue-Rui Peng,1 Yun-Rui Liu,1,2 Dong-Qiong Fan,1,3 Xu Lei,1 Quan-Ying Liu,4 Jing Yu1,5 1Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 2Department for Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland; 3School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Biomedical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China; 5Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Jing YuFaculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Tiansheng Road, Beibei District, Chongqing 400715, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected] LiuDepartment of Biomedical Engineering, Southern University of Science Performance measures for public transport accessibility: Learning from international practice and Technology, 1088 Xueyuan Avenue, Shenzhen 518055, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected]: Recent studies have demonstrated that sleep not only facilitates memory consolidation but also benefits more complex cognitive skills such as decision-making in young adults.
Older adults use different decision strategies compared with young adults, which leaves the role of sleep in older adults’ decision-making unclear.We investigated the age-by-sleep effect on decision-making.Methods: We recruited 67 young adults (ages 18 to 29 years) and 66 older adults (ages 60 to 79 years) and randomly assigned them into Good Questions 11: Where are governments’ plans for dealing with food system disruptions? the “sleep” or “wake” study condition.They were given a modified Iowa gambling task to perform before and after a 12-hour interval with sleep or wakefulness.Results: Using the typical model-free analysis, we found that young adults’ between-session performance improved greater than that of older adults regardless of the sleep/wake condition.
Furthermore, older adults with longer total sleep time showed a greater improvement in the selection of one “good” deck.To further examine the sleep effect on age-related differences in cognitive processes underlying decision-making, we conducted computational modelling.This more fine-grained analysis revealed that sleep improved feedback sensitivity for both young and older adults while it increased loss aversion for older adults but not for young adults.Conclusion: These findings indicate that sleep promotes learning-based decision-making performance via facilitating value representation, and such modulation is distinct in young compared to older adults.Keywords: decision-making, the Iowa gambling task, sleep, aging, computational modelling.