Abstract
The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to assess real life decision-making impairment in a wide variety of clinical populations. Our study evaluated how IGT learning occurs across two sessions, and whether a period of intervening sleep between sessions can enhance learning. Furthermore, we investigate whether pre-sleep learning is necessary for this improvement. A 200-trial version of the IGT was administered at two sessions separated by wake, sleep or sleep and wake (time-of-day control). Participants were categorized as learners and non-learners based on initial performance in session one. In session one, participants initially preferred the high-frequency reward decks B and D, however, a subset of learners decreased choice from negative expected value ‘bad’ deck B and increased choices towards with a positive expected value ‘good’ decks (decks C and D). The learners who had a period of sleep (sleep and sleep/wake control conditions) between sessions showed significantly larger reduction in choices from deck B and increase in choices from good decks compared to learners that had intervening wake. Our results are the first to show that post-learning sleep can improve performance on a complex decision-making task such as the IGT. These results provide new insights into IGT learning and have important implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of “sleeping on” a decision.
Highlights
Pilot Task: Task Development Within the sleep literature, sleep-related improvement is largely reliant on initial insight being achieved prior to sleep [19,27,28,29], effects can be lost if participants hit a ceiling during initial learning [19,30]
In the first block, deck B was most preferred and decks B and D were preferred over deck A and C (Fig. 2A)
Tests of simple effects of deck at block 1 revealed a significant effect (F[3, 364] = 81.55, p,0.01) with Tukey tests showing deck B preferred over all decks, followed by deck D that was preferred over decks A and C
Summary
The decision process is difficult when options are complex and involve multiple risks and benefits, such as the decision to take a new job or move to a new city. A common word of advice to individuals before making an important or difficult decision is to ‘sleep on it’. This implies that when weighing the risks and benefits of multiple options, sleep may help sort through information to provide clear insight to the answer. It is a common practice, there has yet to be strong evidence that sleep facilitates the decision-making process
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