Abstract
The role of subjective sleep quality in cognitive performance has gained increasing attention in recent decades. In this paper, our aim was to test the relationship between subjective sleep quality and a wide range of cognitive functions in a healthy young adult sample combined across three studies. Sleep quality was assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the Athens Insomnia Scale, and a sleep diary to capture general subjective sleep quality, and the Groningen Sleep Quality Scale to capture prior night’s sleep quality. Within cognitive functions, we tested working memory, executive functions, and several sub-processes of procedural learning. To provide more reliable results, we included robust frequentist as well as Bayesian statistical analyses. Unequivocally across all analyses, we showed that there is no association between subjective sleep quality and cognitive performance in the domains of working memory, executive functions and procedural learning in healthy young adults. Our paper can contribute to a deeper understanding of subjective sleep quality and its measures, and we discuss various factors that may affect whether associations can be observed between subjective sleep quality and cognitive performance.
Highlights
The role of subjective sleep quality in cognitive performance has gained increasing attention in recent decades
Individuals reporting the occurrence of any kind of extreme life event during the last three months that might have had an impact on their mood or daily rhythms were excluded from the study
The working memory capacity and executive functions of the participants were in the standard range for their age[52,53]
Summary
The role of subjective sleep quality in cognitive performance has gained increasing attention in recent decades. Researchers and clinicians often tend to rely on questionnaires (i.e., subjective measures) to assess sleep parameters (e.g., sleep latency, sleep quality, sleep disturbances, or sleep duration) This inclination has motivated the current study to explore the relationship between sleep questionnaires and cognitive functions. In a placebo sleep study, young adults were randomly told they had below or above average sleep quality based on their brainwaves and other psychophysiological measures[2] This constructed belief about their sleep quality affected their performance in attentional and executive function tasks. One of the most widely-used sleep questionnaires is the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI)[14], a self-administered questionnaire, in which participants rate their subjective sleep quality based on several questions These questions deal with various aspects of sleep that range from the average amount of sleep during the night, the difficulty experienced in falling asleep, and other sleep disturbances. Libman et al.[16] showed that the two measurement types are tapping the same domains but lead to somewhat different results due to methodological differences: questionnaires can be susceptible to memory distortion while sleep diaries may be distorted by atypical sleep experiences during the monitored period
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