TY  - JOUR
A1  - Könen, Tanja
A1  - Dirk, Judith
A1  - Schmiedek, Florian
T1  - Cognitive benefits of last night's sleep : daily variations in children's sleep behavior are related to working memory fluctuations
T2  - The journal of child psychology and psychiatry
N2  - Background: Recent studies have suggested substantial fluctuations of cognitive performance in adults both across and within days, but very little is known about such fluctuations in children. Children's sleep behavior might have an important influence on their daily cognitive resources, but so far this has not been investigated in terms of naturally occurring within-person variations in children's everyday lives.
Methods: In an ambulatory assessment study, 110 elementary school children (8–11 years old) completed sleep items and working memory tasks on smartphones several times per day in school and at home for 4 weeks. Parents provided general information about the children and their sleep habits.
Results: We identified substantial fluctuations in the children's daily cognitive performance, self-reported nightly sleep quality, time in bed, and daytime tiredness. All three facets were predictive of performance fluctuations in children's school and daily life. Sleep quality and time in bed were predictive of performance in the morning, and afternoon performance was related to current tiredness. The children with a lower average performance level showed a higher within-person coupling between morning performance and sleep quality.
Conclusions: Our findings contribute important insights regarding a potential source of performance fluctuations in children. The effect of varying cognitive resources should be investigated further because it might impact children's daily social, emotional, and learning-related functioning. Theories about children's cognitive and educational development should consider fluctuations on micro-longitudinal scales (e.g., day-to-day) to identify possible mechanisms behind long-term changes.
KW  - Working memory
KW  - sleep
KW  - school children
KW  - structural equation modeling
KW  - longitudinal studies
Y1  - 2014
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45568
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-455682
SN  - 1469-7610
SN  - 0021-9630
N1  - © 2014 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
VL  - 56
IS  - 2
SP  - 171
EP  - 182
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Oxford
ER  -