One week of chronic sleep debt does not affect decision-making processes in a mouse version of the Iowa Gambling Task.

Socio-professional pressures push people to sleep less which leads to chronic sleep debt (CSD) for a significant percentage of the population. Although the health consequences of CSD are well known, research shows that high-level cognitive processes in humans are more affected by acute sleep debt (ASD) rather than CSD (Drake et al., 2001). We have previously shown that ASD has deleterious effects on decision-making in mice and that some mice were more sensitive to ASD than others (Pittaras et al., 2018) by using a rodent version of the Iowa Gambling Task (Bechara et al., 1994). In this study, we showed that, as in humans, CSD has fewer effects on decision-making compared to ASD. We hypothesize that this observation was due to the set-up of a compensatory mechanism.