Local slow wave activity in regular sleep reveals individual risk preferences

Abstract

In many everyday life situations, we have to make decisions under varying degrees of risk. Even though previous research has shown that the manipulation of sleep affects risky decision-making, it yet remains to be understood how regular, healthy sleep relates to risk preferences. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between individual, temporally stable neural sleep characteristics and individual differences in risk preferences in healthy adults. Sleep data were collected using a portable high-density EEG system at participants’ home. Results revealed a significant negative correlation between local sleep depth, as reflected in slow-wave activity (SWA) in a cluster of 5 electrodes located over the right prefrontal cortex and risk-taking behavior. This finding remained significant when controlling for total sleep time. Moreover, the association between SWA over the right prefrontal cortex and risk preferences was very similar in all sleep cycles. Our findings suggest that sleep depth in the right prefrontal cortex, an area involved in self-regulation, might serve as a dispositional indicator of lower self-regulatory abilities, which is expressed in greater risk-taking behavior.