The relationship between subjective sleep quality and cognitive performance in healthy young adults: Evidence from three empirical studies

Abstract

Background:The role of sleep in cognitive performance has gained increasing attention in neuroscience and sleep research in the recent decades, however, the relationship between subjective (self-reported) sleep quality and cognitive performance has not yet been comprehensively characterized. In this paper, our aim was to test the relationship between subjective sleep quality and a wide range of cognitive functions in healthy young adults across three studies. Sleep quality was assessed by Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Athens Insomnia Scale, and in a subgroup (Study 2), a sleep diary to capture general subjective sleep quality, and Groningen Sleep Quality Scale to capture prior night's sleep quality. Within cognitive functions, we tested several sub-processes of procedural learning, working memory and executive functions (assessed by the Alternating Serial Reaction Time, Counting Span and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, respectively). Combined across the three studies, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and Athens Insomnia Scale were aggregated using principal component analysis, and linear mixed-effects models were used to investigate the effect of poor sleep quality on cognitive performance metrics. Additionally, in Study 2, the associations between Sleep diary and Groningen Sleep Quality Scale and cognitive performance were tested. To test the amount of evidence either for associations or no associations between subjective sleep quality and cognitive performance, we calculated Bayes Factors along with frequentist analyses. Results: Unequivocally across all analyses, we showed that there is no association between subjective sleep quality and cognitive performance in the domain of procedural learning, working memory, and executive functions. Conclusions: 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. 3 Background The role of sleep in cognitive performance has gained increasing attention in neuroscience and sleep research in the recent decades [1, 2]. Numerous experimental methods exist that can be employed for examining the association between sleep and cognitive performance. The most common approach is to compare cognitive performance of healthy participants (good sleepers) with that of patients with sleep disorders (e.g., for a recent meta-analysis on insomnia see É Fortier-Brochu, S Beaulieu-Bonneau, H Ivers and CM Morin [3]. Further insights can be gained from within-group investigations on the association between sleep parameters and cognitive performance. Sleep parameters can be evaluated based on actigraph or electroencephalograph measurements, which are time-consuming and require hardly accessible equipment. Hence, many studies tend to rely on questionnaires to assess sleep parameters and their relationship with cognitive performance [4-7]. Previous studies have shown that subjective and objective sleep parameters could...

0337 Association Between Free-living Sleep and Memory and Attention in Healthy Adolescents

“…The authors also noted that age associated positively with sleep duration and negatively with sleep efficiency 15 , indicating that younger participants likely slept longer than 8.2 ± 0.6 h/night with an efficiency below 86.5 ± 5.1%, the reported averages for each parameter. A recent study of healthy adults with a mean age closer to that of our participants (approximately 21 years) found no association between subjective sleep quality and working memory 38 . The authors suggest that the lack of association may have been due to a ceiling effect of studying a healthy population with limited prevalence of disorders known to cause sleep disturbances, which is also the case in the present study.…”

“…On the other hand, the minimal associations between free-living sleep and cognitive function may have been due to a ceiling effect in the performance on the cognitive tasks related to the peak in the cognitive function that www.nature.com/scientificreports/ reportedly occurs in young adulthood, close to the age range of our generally healthy, older adolescent population. Working memory has been reported to peak in young adulthood 38,41,46,47 . In support of this, the responses on all cognitive loads of the working memory task in the current study were faster and more accurate than in a previous study of male participants with a slightly older mean age (28 ± 4 years) tested with the same paradigm in our laboratory 48 .…”

Subjective sleep quality and association with depression syndrome, chronic diseases and health-related physical fitness in the middle-aged and elderly

“…Sleep is important to physical, cognitive, and psychological health. Sleep quality changes as a function of normal aging, there is no association between subjective sleep quality and cognitive performance in healthy young adults [10], and only half of middle-aged and elderly Chinese reported good sleep quality [11]. Agerelated sleep changes may lead to poor sleep quality in older adults with physical or psychiatric disorders [12].…”

Sleep continuity, stability and organization in good and bad sleepers

“…Bastien et al, 2014 for a review) and healthy populations, namely in the elderly, who often report a relatively good perception of sleep despite marked objective sleep quality disruptions (Buysse et al, 1991;Vitiello et al, 2004;Zilli et al, 2009). It has been argued that objective and subjective sleep assessments may not necessarily measure the same aspects of sleep quality and disturbance and actually rely on different parameters (Goelema et al, 2019;Zavecz et al, 2018). Another possible explanation of the mixed and discrepant data is that traditional sleep measures, such as SE, WASO time, total sleep duration and sleep stage proportions, while useful to describe overall sleep macrostructure, could be insufficient to detect subtler disruptions of the sleep episode.…”