Sleep and cognitive performance in children

According to various surveys school aged children are not getting enough sleep and a remarkable number has some kind of sleep problem. The proposed project aims at investigating the relationship between sleep, learning ability, memory capacity, school performance and attention in children aged between 9 and 11 years. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the role of sleep for memory and learning processes. However, studies concerning sleep and cognition in children are still rare. Therefore the presented proposal strives for an in-depth analysis of the relationship between sleep and cognitive/academic performance in school aged children. It should be demonstrated that manipulations (by means of Neurofeedback training or structured sleep education) that improve children`s sleep duration and quality will enhance cognitive/academic performance. As it is very important to identify the neuronal key mechanisms which are altered by Neurofeedback training and/or sleep education, sophisticated methods like electroencephalography (EEG) and quantitative analysis techniques (e.g., event-related synchronization, Coherence, Gabor wavelet based power-frequency analyses) will be used to identify these key mechanisms. Healthy, prepubertal children (9-11 years) will be treated by either a 5-week sensorimotor-rhythm (12-15Hz) Neurofeedback training or a standardized sleep education program. It should be investigated whether those sleep enhancing manipulations i) will manifest itself as detectable changes in polysomnography (PSG) and actigraphy and ii) will improve general learning, memory and attentional functioning in healthy school aged children. Comparison between experimental groups (n=30 for each group) and a sex and age matched control group (n=30) will allow controlling for spontaneous changes in sleep patterns. In our view this project is both ambitious and practically important, as it combines knowledge gained from pure research (e.g., PSG during sleep, sleep and cognition research, quantitative EEG analysis of cognitive processes during waking and its relation to subsequent sleep activity) with an applied matter, namely the development and evaluation of treatments enhancing sleep quality and duration as well as daytime performance in school aged children. An additional output of this project is that investigated treatments can be made available to the scholarship community, as a basis to initiate action campaigns to raise the sensitivity of the general public to the problematic of sleep quality in childhood.