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Abstract Introduction The transition to adolescence is marked by critical shifts in sleep, including increased variability as well as delayed bedtimes, reduced total sleep time (TST), and reduced homeostatic sleep pressure. Sleep supports healthy brain development, and insufficient sleep impairs brain development in children and adolescents. Short-term experimental manipulations of sleep disturbance and deprivation in adults leads to dysfunction in declarative and working memory. The few experimental studies in youth suggest their cognitive abilities may be more resilient to sleep loss, but these typically include only one night of sleep manipulation. Here, we examined this phenomenon across a week of data. Methods Data was used from eleven 9- to 13-year-olds (M = 12.52, SD = 1.4, F = 5) in an ongoing measurement burst longitudinal study spanning one year. For seven consecutive days, participants completed daily sleep diaries, and the working memory task, the O-SPAN, which consists of remembering letters intermixed with math equations. Multilevel models which adjusted for age and sex were used to examine the bidirectional associations between sleep and cognitive performance at the between and within-subjects levels. Results Within-subjects (daily) variation in sleep duration, relative to each child’s typical sleep duration, was related to better working memory performance at trending significance. Within-subjects (daily) variation in working memory, relative to each child’s typical working memory performance, was related to significantly longer sleep duration. There are currently no statistically significant associations at the between-subjects level. Conclusion Our preliminary results suggest there are within-person, dynamic fluctuations in sleep duration and working memory in adolescents. On nights when adolescents sleep better, their working memory improves (and vice versa). Our ongoing day-to-day investigation of the role of sleep on cognition (target N=60) provides insight into the nuanced role sleep plays, especially along the performance spectrum. Future analyses in this ongoing study will evaluate dependencies in the data structure across the week, as well as developmental trends in sleep-memory associations. The current results are novel and suggest longitudinal methods are critical in the analysis of sleep and cognition in development. Support (if any) Award to KS: NICHD/NIH K08HD107161
Simon et al. (Sat,) studied this question.