The effects of 24-hour sleep deprivation on the exploration–exploitation trade-off

Abstract

Sleep deprivation has a complex set of neurological effects that go beyond a mere slowing of mental processes. While cognitive and perceptual impairments in sleep deprived individuals are widespread, some abilities remain intact. In an effort to characterize these effects, some have suggested an impairment of complex decision-making ability despite intact ability to follow simple rules. To examine this trade-off, 24-hour total sleep deprived individuals performed two versions of a resource acquisition foraging task, one in which exploration is optimal (to succeed, abandon low value, high saliency options) and another in which exploitation is optimal (to succeed, refrain from switching between options). Sleep deprived subjects exhibited decreased performance on the exploitation task compared to non-sleep deprived controls, yet both groups exhibited increased performance on the exploratory task. These results speak to previous neuropsychological work on cognitive control.

Keywords:

• sleep deprivation
• exploration-exploitation
• reasoning
• decision making
• resource acquisition
• foraging

Acknowledgements

The authors are pleased to acknowledge the support of the Army, grant #W911NF-07-2-0023, through The Center for Strategic and Innovative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin for the research described here in this report.