Abstract: In many industries, it is possible and sometimes inevitable for decision makers to make choices and decisions under the state of mental fatigue due to insufficient sleep. Sleep deprivation, as the laboratory model of insufficient sleep, has been proved to have significant influence on risky decision-making, while the internal mechanism remains unclear. A hypothetical model was suggested based previous studies that that the feedback processing, risk perception, inhibition control, and priority of heuristic system could mediate the influence of sleep deprivation on risky decision-making. Using laboratory study and field study, the current study planed to adopt Simple gambling task, Adult decision-making competence scale, Probability discounting task, two choice oddball paradigm, and other tasks and measurements, and compare participants’ performance in these tasks before and after sleep deprivation. Meanwhile, the connections between executive control network and reward network were compared, and the changes of task-induced FRN and other EEG components were compared as well before and after sleep deprivation. The results might present scientific explanations about how sleep deprivation influences risky decision-making, and provide theoretical basis for further exploration to avoid errors in decision-making due to insufficient sleep.

Key words: sleep deprivation, risky decision making, mechanism, brain imaging, event-related potentials