0332 Effect of Prior Sleep Duration on Distinct Measures of Daytime Cognitive Performance in Late Adolescence

Abstract

Abstract Introduction A recent longitudinal study of sleep need changes across adolescence reported how prior sleep duration affects daytime sleepiness and vigilant attention in children ages 10-16 years. In a follow-up study, we extend the age range in a new group of participants and add additional performance tests. Here we report year 1 data on the effect of systematically varied time in bed (TIB) on daytime vigilance, working memory, and decision making. Methods Data are for 52 participants aged 15.0-20.4 years (mean±SD: 17.7±1.8 years). Annually, participants keep each of three different TIB schedules: 7h, 8.5h or 10h TIB for 4 consecutive nights. The 4th night is followed by a laboratory day of performance testing. The day includes four 10-minute psychomotor vigilance tests (PVT); a serial position Sternberg working memory task; and an AX continuous performance test with switch (AX-CPTs) measuring cognitive flexibility in decision making. Results PVT performance evaluated by the log of the signal to noise ratio (LSNR) improved monotonically with increasing TIB (p<0.0001). TIB also affected serial position Sternberg task accuracy (p=0.008) but not the probe position effect (p=0.66), indicating that TIB did not affect working memory. TIB also affected AX-CPTs accuracy (p<0.0001), but TIB did not significantly affect decision making and cognitive flexibility measures extracted from this task (all p>0.09). Conclusion The initial data from this longitudinal study on older adolescents confirm what we observed for younger adolescents. Increasing TIB improves daytime vigilance but does not affect working memory. These initial results also do not indicate a TIB related improvement in decision making. Data from the entire three year longitudinal study will allow us to further investigate relations of performance to prior sleep duration and whether these relations change with age. Results from dose-response studies such as these can help guide sleep duration recommendations. Support PHS grant R01 HL116490 supported this work.