Poster #38 - The Impact of Habitual Sleep on Adolescent Neural Reward Activation

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Cognitive Process

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Poor decision-making can lead to engagement in health risk behaviors, which prevail during adolescence and have serious lifetime implications (CDC, 2017). Sleep deprivation studies have found a relationship between lack of sleep and activation in cortical regions of the brain relevant to reward and incentive processing (Krause et al., 2017). These findings are important for adolescents and young adults in particular because teenagers require 8-10 hours of sleep per night, and young adults require 7-9 (Hirshkowitz, 2015). The current study aims to investigate the effects of habitual sleep on brain activity during anticipation of reward, via multiband functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and actigraphy data.

Methods: A total of 60 young adults were drawn from the first wave of an ongoing longitudinal study on risk behavior that recruited youth from public high schools in Southeast Michigan (N=2017). The sample for whom detailed sleep data and fMRI imaging are available includes 60 participants (to date), selected from the larger sample to include different levels of risk behavior. Participants were required to wear motionlogger actigraphs on their wrists while consecutively completing daily sleep diaries for approximately one week before their fMRI scan. Consensus issues between the objective sleep data and subjective diaries were reviewed with participants during their scan visit. Scans ran for approximately one hour, and consisted of a monetary incentive delay task (MID), a task responding to emotive faces, and several structural scanning segments. The task of interest, MID, is a game where participants are given the opportunity to win or lose money ($5, $0.20). They were asked to monitor the shape that appeared on a screen inside the scanner (2000ms; Random: Win $5 or $0.20, No Win or Lose, Don’t Lose $5 or $0.20, 100 trials total) and respond by pressing a button with their index finger when that same shape reappeared on the screen (1500 – 4000ms). Statistical analysis in IBM SPSS software was used to correlate sleep variables and activation levels at regions of interest in the brain.

Results: Habitual sleep duration for an average of six days (Table 1) was significantly negatively associated with insula activation during the reward feedback phase of the MID task (Figure 1), consistent with previous findings on sleep deprivation and reward-based insula activation. Participants had an average response time of 232.9 ms, with an accuracy of 57.19 correct responses per 100 trials of the MID (Table 1).

Conclusion: These findings indicate that adolescent reward activation in the insula is impacted by total sleep time. Adolescents who have low habitual sleep appear to show higher sensitivity to rewards, potentially affecting their decision-making and risk-taking behaviors.

Authors

• Sarah Churchill, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Edward D. Huntley, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Demidenko, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joshua R.B. Hatfield, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Keating, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author