Abstract
Sleep is known to benefit consolidation of memories, especially those of motivational relevance. Yet it remains largely unknown the extent to which sleep influences reward-associated behavior, in particular, whether and how sleep modulates reward evaluation that critically underlies value-based decisions. Here, we show that neural processing during sleep can selectively bias preferences in simple economic choices when the sleeper is stimulated by covert, reward-associated cues. Specifically, presenting the spoken name of a familiar, valued snack item during midday nap significantly improves the preference for that item relative to items not externally cued. The cueing-specific preference enhancement is sleep-dependent and can be predicted by cue-induced neurophysiological signals at the subject and item level. Computational modeling further suggests that sleep cueing accelerates evidence accumulation for cued options during the post-sleep choice process in a manner consistent with the preference shift. These findings suggest that neurocognitive processing during sleep contributes to the fine-tuning of subjective preferences in a flexible, selective manner.
Data availability
Data and code used for data analysis are publicly available online via Open Science Framework (OSF) at (https://osf.io/9ndhy/).
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Data and Code for Promoting subjective preferences in simple economic choices during napOpen Science Framework, osf.io/9ndhy.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31671171)
- Lusha Zhu
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31630034)
- Lusha Zhu
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31571099)
- Jie Shi
National Basic Research Program of China (2015CB856404)
- Jie Shi
National Basic Research Program of China (2015CB553503)
- Jie Shi
National Natural Science Foundation of China (81801315)
- Sizhi Ai
The funders had no role in study design, data collection, and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants provided written informed consent. Study procedures were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee at Peking University.
Copyright
© 2018, Ai et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Promoting subjective preferences in simple economic choices during nap
eLife 7:e40583.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40583
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