Promoting subjective preferences in simple economic choices during nap
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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