User:Neuro 3850/sandbox

1.Introduction 1.1 Evidence for irrational decision making Evidence suggests that sleep loss can adversely affect a variety of higher-order cognitive processes, including problem-solving, inhibitory control and complex decision-making. Many of these higher-order capacities are believed to be mediated by the prefrontal cortex, a complex region of the brain that appears to be particularly affected by prolonged wakefulness. The domain of fatigue impact scale is related to decision making in varies ways. There are three domains, cognitive, physical and emotional. A certain action would hence lead to a certain choice, but if that action depends on how fatigued you are choices made could vary if you were not fatigued. Encoding of those values would be relative instead of absolute in the parietal cortex. 1.2 Personlaity traits of irrationality These norms on decision making seem to work on a marginal utility based theory, which is the increment of utility associated with a reward depends on the reference point. The more fatigued you are, the less likely it is that you would pursue a decision or choice that is more rewarding. The utility of reward would depend on how fatigued you are likely to be. Gamblers will chase their losses as they lose more money, this leads to risk aversion. The same impact can be seen on a person that is more fatigued. A person that is more fatigued would be more likely to make risky decisions as opposed to a person that is not fatigued. Local irrationalities can arise because evolution is trading off the costs of accurate sensory encoding against the cost of irrational decision making.

1.3 Domains of irrational decision making 1.3.1 Cognitive Virtually all types of sleep problems are related with performance discrepancies in occupational, educational, and other settings such as test taking in a classroom. The deficits include attention, other measures of cognition, including memory and complex decision making. Sleep loss affects alertness, attention, and other cognitive functions in adolescents (Randazzo et al., 1998), but demonstrating a causal relationship between sleep loss and academic performance has been difficult. Most studies attempting to link the two are cross-sectional in design, based on self-reporting of grades and sleep times, and lack a control for potential confounders (Wolfson and Carskadon, 2003). An association between short sleep duration and lower academic performance goes hand in hand. Much of the difficulty in studying sleep loss and its relation to academic performance stems from multiple, often unmeasured, environmental factors that affect sleep such as school demands, student employment after school, TV viewing, and Internet access. These are set against the rapid evolving and physiological changes occurring in adolescence. Another difficulty is the challenge of objectively assessing school performance.

1.3.2 Emotional Sleep deprivation can cause many neurological changes on aspects of emotion. .Being fatigued can lead to risky decision making that can also be associated with impulsiveness .The ability to integrate emotional information with cognitive processing appears to require the interaction of several key brain regions which include ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the insular cortex, and the amygdala. These three brain regions comprise a neural system that integrates emotional states, prior learning, and conscious cognition to guide decision-making. From these three brain regions the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is thought to function as the critical integrator of emotional and cognitive information in the provision of decision-making .Regardless of relatively normal levels of cognitive intelligence, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex often display profound impairments in social judgment and deficits in emotionally based decision-making .Thus, dysfunction within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is attendant with impaired emotional intelligence and poor constructive thinking processes, while the intact functioning of this region allows the individual to cope submissively with changing demands.

1.3.3 Physical Individuals who are fatigued are less like to be involved in activites that include brain processing, stressing the brain or any sort of physical activity. This leads to an important issue of health. Not being abke to get enough sleep for example can cause you to alter your thoughts which hence impacts your decision making. Not being phycially active leads you to be in a tired state that impacts you mentally and well as emotionally.

2.	Hypothesis Sleep deprivation causes fatigue in many different areas that are associated with decision making such as cognitive, emotional, and physical processes. Problems in these domains due to fatigue caused by lack of sleep correlates to making decisions that may not be in the best overall interest of the individual. We hypothesize that if an individual has a bigger problem with fatigue in these three domains it will be a bigger problem to make a decision that will result in the highest utility for the individual.

3.	Methods 4.	Results [images linked in moodle wiki - Nov. 23, 2013] Fig. 1. Summary of all tabulated responses, grouped by response type. Our group found that, of the 24 surveys included in analysis, 23% of the participants felt that various fatigue-related issues represented "no problem" for them, while 36% of the participants experienced a "small problem," 27% experienced a "big problem," 12% experienced a "big problem," and 2% experienced an "extreme problem" in domains related to fatigue.

Fig. 2. Results of question 18, which stated, "I find it difficult to make decisions."

As seen in in Fig. 2 and it's accompanying table, the results of question 18, which directly assessed the participants' subjective ability to make decisions, show that 45.8% of participants reported "I find it difficult to make decisions" as a "small problem." The smallest response category was that of "extreme problem," with 4.2% of students giving this response.

Fig. 3. Results of question 11, which stated, "I find that I am more forgetful."

As seen in Fig 3. and it's accompanying table, the results of question 11 indicate that 41.7% of participants felt that "I am more more forgetful" was a "moderate problem." The same percentage of participants, 8.3%, indicated that this was an "extreme problem" or "no problem."

Fig. 4. Results of question 33, which stated, "I am less able to deal with emotional issues."

As seen in Fig 4. and it's accompanying table, the results of question 33 indicate that 41.7% percent of the class felt that "I am less able to deal with emotional issues" was a "moderate problem." The smallest response category was that of "extreme problem," with 4.2% of students giving this response.

Fig. 5. Results of question 37, which stated, "I have to limit my physical activities."

As seen in Fig. 5 and it's accompanying table, the results of question 37 indicate that 91.6% of the participants felt that "I have to limit my physical activities" was either "no problem" or a "small problem" (with responses equally divided between the two responses). None of the participants indicated that an "extreme problem" for this questions.

5.	Discussion 6.     Limitations There were multiple limitations that impacted our results. We excluded overall scores that were lower than 20 because these individuals were not experiencing fatigue therefore lowering our sample size; if we had a larger sample size the results may have been different. There is a higher ratio of females to males in the Neuroscience 3850 class which also may have skewed the results as females and males experience fatigue differently as well as have different decision making patterns. The Fatigue Impact Scale is an indirect measure of decision making. All of the questions can be related to decision making but implementing another survey may may produce more significant results directly relating to decision making and fatigue. 7.	References

Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Damasio, A. R., & Lee, G. P. (1999). Different contributions of the human amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex to decision-making. The Journal of Neuroscience, 19(13), 5473-5481

William, D.S.K, K.G. Ellen, L. Erica, A.N. Rachel, H.K. Gary, and J.B. Thomas. "Sleep deprivation reduces perceived emotional intelligence and constructive thinking skills." ELSEVIER. 9.5 (2008 ): 517-526. Print. .