Sufficient Sleep Is Key to Proper Decision Making

In that getting insufficient and/or poor quality sleep has been shown to affect one’s decision making skills, Todd Maddox, from University of Texas at Austin (USA), and colleagues studied 49 West Point military cadets, subjecting 21 of them to sleep deprivation and monitoring all subjects for their capacity to make split-second decisions.  The researchers found that moderate sleep deprivation caused an overall immediate loss of information-integration thought capacities, with accuracy on the test tasks declining by 2.4% when the participants were sleep deprived and improving by 4.3% when they were well rested. According to the findings, people who rely more on rule-based (over-thinking) strategies are more vulnerable to the ill effects of sleep deprivation.