Abstract
The study investigated the associations between children’s self-reported habitual sleep disturbance and multidimensional executive function (EF). Two hundred and four 7–9-year-old typically developing children completed the Sleep Self-Report and finished the Red-Blue Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and Backward Digit Span Test, indexing different EF components including inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Results revealed that all the three EF components were significantly correlated with sleep. However, cognitive flexibility was no longer significantly related to sleep when the other EF components – inhibitory control and working memory – were controlled for. Meanwhile, inhibitory control, as well as working memory, was still significantly related to sleep after controlling for the other EF components. Results suggest that children’s self-reported sleep might be associated directly with inhibitory control and working memory, but indirectly with cognitive flexibility.
Highlights
People spend approximately one-third of their lives asleep
All the three kinds of executive function (EF) were significantly related to sleep, indicating that the more disturbed sleep was associated with worse EF abilities
As we found that the association of sleep with cognitive flexibility turned non-significant after controlling for inhibitory control and working memory, we further conducted a path analysis model to investigate the mediation effect of inhibitory control and working memory between sleep and cognitive flexibility
Summary
People spend approximately one-third of their lives asleep. Sleep is essential to healthy development across physical, psychosocial, emotional, and cognitive domains (Sadeh, 2007; Ednick et al, 2009; Dewald et al, 2010; Beebe, 2011; Wang and Yip, 2020). With parts of studies revealing the link between sleep and some cognitive abilities, while other studies showing no association in some cognitive tasks (Lim and Dinges, 2010; de Bruin et al, 2017). Such inconsistencies might be attributed to heterogeneous measurement of sleep and cognition, as well as diverse samples from infant to adults, from healthy to atypical populations
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