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Updated: Jan 6, 2026

Collecting Sleep, Circadian, Fatigue, and Performance Data in Complex Operational Environments
Published on: August 8, 2019
Thinking about complex decisions: How sleep and time-of-day influence complex choices
Todd McElroy1, David L Dickinson2
1Florida Gulf Coast University, United States.
Abstract:
In this study, we systematically manipulate a person's state of sleep; Sleep-deprived and Well-rested along with Matching or Mismatching the decision time-of-day to their circadian preferred time-of-day. We assessed how these conditions influenced performance on an incentivized complex decision task. In the overall analysis of these variables no differences emerged. However, a comparison of the more cognitively depleting Sleep-deprivation/Circadian-mismatch condition to the cognitively enhancing Well-rested/Circadian-match condition showed improved performance in the Well-rested/Circadian matched group for one complex decision task but not for the other. These findings build upon the existing literature on sleep and circadian rhythm effects while uniquely observing the combined effects of these variables on complex decision making.
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