To study the associations between sleep quality/quantity and performance in auditory/visual working memory tasks of different load levels.
Sixty schoolchildren aged 6 to 13 years from normal school classes voluntarily participated. Actigraphy measurement was done during a typical school week for 72 consecutive hours. It was timed together with the working memory experiments to obtain information on children's sleep during that period. The n-back task paradigm was used to examine auditory and visual working memory functions.
Lower sleep efficiency and longer sleep latency were associated with a higher percentage of incorrect responses in working memory tasks at all memory load levels (partial correlations, controlling for age, all p values