Abstract
Previous research has established important developmental changes in sleep and memory during early childhood. These changes have been linked separately to brain development, yet few studies have explored their interrelations during this developmental period. The goal of this report was to explore these associations in 200 (100 female) typically developing 4- to 8-year-old children. We examined whether habitual sleep patterns (24-h sleep duration, nap status) were related to children’s performance on a source memory task and hippocampal subfield volumes. Results revealed that, across all participants, after controlling for age, habitual sleep duration was positively related to source memory performance. In addition, in younger (4–6 years, n = 67), but not older (6–8 years, n = 70) children, habitual sleep duration was related to hippocampal head subfield volume (CA2-4/DG). Moreover, within younger children, volume of hippocampal subfields varied as a function of nap status; children who were still napping (n = 28) had larger CA1 volumes in the body compared to children who had transitioned out of napping (n = 39). Together, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis that habitually napping children may have more immature cognitive networks, as indexed by hippocampal integrity. Furthermore, these results shed additional light on why sleep is important during early childhood, a period of substantial brain development.
Highlights
Previous research has established important developmental changes in sleep and memory during early childhood
This relation between habitual 24-h sleep duration and source memory performance held for both younger (r(98) = 0.294, p = 0.003) and older (r(74) = 0.229, p = 0.047) children based on a median split of age (6.04 years)
In order to determine the specificity of these differences, we examined differences between young nappers and young non-nappers in 24-h sleep duration, estimates of verbal and spatial IQ, volume of the amygdala not hypothesized to differ as a function of nap status, and global brain metrics including total gray matter volume, subcortical gray matter volume, and intracranial volume (ICV) (Table 1)
Summary
Previous research has established important developmental changes in sleep and memory during early childhood These changes have been linked separately to brain development, yet few studies have explored their interrelations during this developmental period. We examined whether habitual sleep patterns (24-h sleep duration, nap status) were related to children’s performance on a source memory task and hippocampal subfield volumes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that habitually napping children may have more immature cognitive networks, as indexed by hippocampal integrity These results shed additional light on why sleep is important during early childhood, a period of substantial brain development. These acute effects may add up over time, as longer habitual sleep duration (i.e., the average amount of sleep a child gets per day) has been associated with better measures of global cognitive function[17,18], including m emory[19]
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