Abstract
Mind-wandering or the spontaneous, uncontrolled changes in the allocation of attention resources (lapses) may cause variability in performance. In childhood, the relationship between the activation state of the brain, such as in attentional performance, and sleep has not been explored in detail. We investigated the role of sleep in attentional performance, and explored the most important parameters of their relationship. We objectively measured momentary lapses of attention of 522 children and correlated them with sleep schedules. In the subgroup of young children (age 7.1 ± 0.6 years; 60.8% girls), increasing age, long sleep duration and assessment closer to the previous night’s sleep period was associated with impaired performance speed and consistency. From pre-adolescence (age 9.4 ± 0.8 years; 50.5% girls) onwards somno-typologies may develop. As a result, in adolescence (age 13.4 ± 1.2 years; 51.3% girls) not only sleep duration but also sleep midpoint and sleep regularity influence the individual speed and stability of attention. Across development, regularity of sleep, individual sleep midpoint and bedtime become increasingly important for optimal performance throughout the day. Attentional performance and sleep shared almost half of their variance, and performance was sleep-driven across childhood. Future studies should focus on intra- and inter-individual differences in sleep-wake behavior to improve performance or decrease mind-wandering in youth by targeting sleep habits.
Highlights
In the scientific literature, terms such as arousal, alertness, vigilance and attention are often interchangeably used
Several examples are: one-night sleep loss[12,19]; an average of 30-min sleep extension or restriction successfully accomplished in 60% of 4th and 6th grade children[20]; a 3 week-long sleep schedule manipulation consisting of baseline, optimized, and restricted while attending school[14,15]; sleep restriction for 1 week of 1-hour per day in 6 school-aged children[16]; a 5-hour restricted time in bed in 14 school-aged girls[21]; and more recently a randomly counterbalanced within-subjects cross-over design of a 6.5 hour sleep duration in adolescents[22]
We investigated the degree of commonality between attentional performance and sleep, and explored their determinants by assessing momentary lapses of attention
Summary
Terms such as arousal, alertness, vigilance and attention are often interchangeably used. Several examples are: one-night sleep loss[12,19]; an average of 30-min sleep extension or restriction successfully accomplished in 60% of 4th and 6th grade children[20]; a 3 week-long sleep schedule manipulation consisting of baseline (self-selected), optimized, and restricted while attending school[14,15]; sleep restriction for 1 week of 1-hour per day in 6 school-aged children[16]; a 5-hour restricted time in bed in 14 school-aged girls[21]; and more recently a randomly counterbalanced within-subjects cross-over design of a 6.5 hour sleep duration in adolescents[22] Each of these studies suggests that performance is adversely affected by experimentally manipulated sleep schedule conditions, across a variety of neurobehavioral tasks assessing, for example, attention, cognition, school performance and others. Arbabi et al.[26] showed that already at the age of 10 years, evening orientation adversely affected academic achievement
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