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Abstract Introduction Sleep is vital for an individual’s cognitive functioning and changes in sleep and cognition are common as individuals age. In older adults, subjective cognitive beliefs are a robust predictor of subsequent objective cognitive decline. Although sleep is consistently associated with subjective cognitive beliefs, its association with objective cognitive functioning is less well defined. This study aimed to examine whether sleep may be associated with objective cognitive functioning through its association with subjective cognitive beliefs in community-dwelling older adults. Methods Participants (N=365) were middle-aged and older adults (Mage=62.8, 59.7% female) who participated in an online study including questionnaires (Insomnia Severity Index, RU-SATED sleep health questionnaire, Karolinska Sleepiness Scale, and the Everyday Cognition Scale) and objective cognitive testing assessing the following domains: impulsivity, executive function, memory, and attention. Bivariate correlations and linear regression analyses examined direct associations between variables. Mediation was examined via SPSS PROCESS macro to determine whether subjective cognitive beliefs mediated the associations among sleep characteristics and objective cognitive functioning. Results Better sleep (i.e., less insomnia symptoms and sleepiness, better sleep health) was associated with more positive subjective cognitive beliefs (all p’s.05). Additionally, less insomnia symptoms (impulsivity, executive functioning, memory), less sleepiness (impulsivity, executive functioning, memory, attention), and better sleep health (executive functioning, memory) were associated with better objective cognitive functioning (all p’s.05). Mediation analyses revealed that subjective cognitive beliefs fully mediated the associations between the following: (1) Insomnia and impulsivity and memory (2) Sleepiness and impulsivity, memory, and executive functioning (3) Sleep health and memory and executive functioning. Subjective cognitive beliefs only partially mediated the associations between the following: (1) Insomnia and executive functioning and (2) Sleepiness and attention. Conclusion Subjective cognitive beliefs play an important role in linking sleep behaviors to objective cognitive functioning in older adults. In fact, many of the sleep—cognitive functioning associations were found to be fully mediated by subjective cognitive beliefs. As beliefs about cognitive functioning are an important predictor of pathological cognitive aging, interventions aimed at improving both sleep and cognitive functioning that utilize social learning principles, such as self-efficacy, may be particularly efficacious. Support (if any)
Nielson et al. (Sat,) studied this question.