Association between free-living sleep and memory and attention in healthy adolescents

Abstract

In laboratory studies, imposed sleep restriction consistently reduces cognitive performance. However, the association between objectively measured, free-living sleep and cognitive function has not been studied in older adolescents. To address this gap, we measured one week of sleep with a wrist-worn GT3X+ actigraph in 160 adolescents (96 girls, 17.7 ± 0.3 years) followed by assessment of working memory with an n-back task and visual attention with a Posner cue-target task. Over the week, participants spent 7.1 ± 0.8 h/night in bed and slept 6.2 ± 0.8 h/night with 88.5 ± 4.8% efficiency and considerable intra-participant night-to-night variation, with a standard deviation in sleep duration of 1.2 ± 0.7 h. Sleep measures the night before cognitive testing were similar to weekly averages. Time in bed the night before cognitive testing was negatively associated with response times during the most challenging memory task (3-back; p = 0.005). However, sleep measures the night before did not correlate with performance on the attention task and weekly sleep parameters were not associated with either cognitive task. Our data suggests shorter acute free-living sleep may negatively impact difficult memory tasks, however the relationship between free-living sleep and cognitive task performance in healthy adolescents is less clear than that of laboratory findings, perhaps due to high night-to-night sleep variation.

Poorer Sleep Health is Associated With Altered Brain Activation During Cognitive Control Processing in Healthy Adults

“…Self-reported and objective measures of sleep duration were differently associated with cognitive control processing, task performance, and other sleep health measures in our study. This provides additional evidence that self-reported versus objective measures of sleep, even within the same dimension, capture different phenomena (Klumpp et al 2017: 2017; Bernstein et al 2019; Stefansdottir et al 2020; Scarlett et al 2021; Tahmasian et al 2021). In the brain, shorter self-reported sleep duration was associated with proactive cognitive control decreases, and shorter objectively measured sleep duration was associated with reactive cognitive control decreases in BOLD activation with time on task (Figure 8).…”

“…Self-reported and objective measures of sleep duration were differently associated with cognitive control activations and with task performance, providing additional evidence that self-reported versus objective measures of sleep - even within the same dimension - capture different phenomena (Klumpp et al 2017; Bernstein et al 2019; Stefansdottir et al 2020; Scarlett et al 2021; Tahmasian et al 2021). Whereas the objective sleep duration was associated with time-on-task decreases in the anterior cingulate cortex - a core region for cognitive control - self-reported sleep duration was associated with time-on-task decreases in temporal areas, which are typically implicated in memory function or semantic processing.…”

“…This limits the interpretation of results, as self-report measures are influenced by recall bias, individual response style, personality traits, and cognitive and mental health status (Manconi et al 2010; Kay et al 2013; Herbert et al 2017; Rezaie et al 2018; Robbins et al 2021; Scarlett et al 2021; Trimmel et al 2021). Furthermore, self-report versus objective measures of sleep are often uncorrelated (Klumpp et al 2017; Thurman et al 2018; Bernstein et al 2019; Stefansdottir et al 2020; Scarlett et al 2021). The focus on singular measures of sleep health also makes it difficult to compare results between studies.…”

“…For example, several studies have found that both shorter and longer self-reported sleep durations, as compared to the recommended number of hours for different age groups (Hirshkowitz et al 2015), are linked to poorer cognitive performance (Ferrie et al 2011;Lo et al 2016;Richards et al 2017;van Oostrom et al 2018;Wild et al 2018;Cheng et al 2020;Ding et al 2020;. However, studies using objective sleep assessment -which are far fewer in number -have not identified a clear-cut relationship between sleep duration and cognitive performance (Kato et al 2018;Bernstein et al 2019;Stefansdottir et al 2020;Scarlett et al 2021). In fact, other dimensions of sleep health, in particular, the timing and variability of sleep, appear to be at least as closely linked to cognitive and brain function as sleep duration itself (Fuligni and Hardway 2006;Mezick et al 2009;Lemola et al 2013;Bei et al 2016;Owens et al 2016;Molzof et al 2018;Facer-Childs et al 2019;Gomez Fonseca and Genzel 2020;Hershner 2020;Lunsford-Avery et al 2020;Zhang et al 2020;Bredeli et al 2022;Stefansdottir et al 2022).…”

Memory and Concentration Skills In A Sample of First Grade Medical Students at University of Baghdad/College of Medicine

“…The associations were somewhat reduced after additional adjustment for non-attendance at school, but remained significant in the fully adjusted models. ( 24,25,27) Regarding studying hours and concentration skills, this study reveals that 67.2% of 61 participants who study less than It seems that students who study 3-6 hours have the least concentration and memory skills; their total number was 26 students (25.2% of total participants). According to their gender: 14 students were males and 12 students were females.…”