Merín Llanos, Nieto Marta, Sánchez-Arias Lucía, Ros Laura, Latorre José Miguel
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Faculty of Medicine, Albacete, Spain.
Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2025 Apr;34(4):1379-1390. doi: 10.1007/s00787-024-02558-9. Epub 2024 Aug 27.
Sleep is essential for cognitive development and brain maturation during early childhood. Studies focused on preschool populations using objective measures of sleep are still scarce. The objective of this study was to examine the associations between objective measures of sleep duration and quality with executive functioning in a 133 non-clinical sample of Spanish participants (M = 60.33 months, SD = 9.04; ages 41-77 months; 51.1% girls). Sleep was assessed for five weeknights using actigraphy; Shape School task was applied to assess inhibition and cognitive flexibility; and Word Span task was used to assess working memory. The results revealed that relation between sleep and executive functioning was significant for inhibition and working memory. Preschoolers with higher sleep efficiency showed better results in executive functioning tasks after controlling for the effect of age. Additionally, age and sleep duration and quality variables were predictive of inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. These results suggest that the different dimensions of sleep could play an important role in the development of executive functions during preschool age. Therefore, improving sleep could lead to an improvement in children's executive functioning in both clinical and educational contexts.
睡眠对于幼儿期的认知发展和大脑成熟至关重要。使用客观睡眠测量方法针对学龄前儿童群体开展的研究仍然较少。本研究的目的是在133名西班牙非临床参与者样本（M = 60.33个月，标准差 = 9.04；年龄41 - 77个月；51.1%为女孩）中，检验睡眠时间和质量的客观测量指标与执行功能之间的关联。使用活动记录仪对五个工作日夜晚的睡眠进行评估；应用形状学校任务评估抑制能力和认知灵活性；使用单词广度任务评估工作记忆。结果显示，睡眠与执行功能之间的关系在抑制能力和工作记忆方面具有显著性。在控制年龄影响后，睡眠效率较高的学龄前儿童在执行功能任务中表现出更好的结果。此外，年龄、睡眠时间和质量变量可预测抑制能力、工作记忆和认知灵活性。这些结果表明，睡眠的不同维度可能在学龄前儿童执行功能的发展中发挥重要作用。因此，改善睡眠可能会在临床和教育环境中提升儿童的执行功能。
