The Association between Executive Function and Sleep in Toddlerhood is Moderated by Socioeconomic Status

• In Event: 2-089 - Sleep and Cognition from Infancy to Middle Childhood: The Role of Socioeconomic Factors

Integrative Statement

Toddlerhood is a critical period in the development of executive functions (EFs), during which large individual differences in EFs emerge. While factors influencing these individual differences have been explored, relatively few studies have examined whether sleep problems explain individual differences in EFs. Additionally, emerging research on the association between sleep and cognitive development in childhood suggests that children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, who have sleep problems, are more like to show poorer cognitive development. The current study examined sleep, behavioral indexes of EFs, and SES in a large sample of toddlers to explore the association between sleep and executive function, and how SES moderates this association.
Participants (428 children, 199 female) were assessed at 30 months of age as part of a longitudinal, multi-site study. Children participated in a battery of well-established lab tasks assessing EFs. These tasks specifically assessed several aspects of inhibitory control, including basic response inhibition, motor control, and tasks that included a motivational component. Family SES was estimated using the Hollingshead Four Factor Index, which takes into account parent education and occupation.
For the week leading up to and following the lab visit, child sleep was assessed using actigraphs, devices that record minute-by-minute motor activity to determine sleep and wake periods. Because actigraphs yield a variety of indexes of sleep, a multidimensional approach to quantifying sleep risk was used to incorporate the maximum amount of meaningful sleep information from each child into a single index (based on the approach of Wallace et al., 2018). This risk index included six actigraphic and parent-reported sleep variables, described in Table 1. Children who scored in the most extreme quartile of each variable (based on the entire sample) were scored as a 1, while the remaining children received a 0. Cutoff values for each variable are included in Table 1. These scores across each of the six included variables were then summed to generate an index of cumulative sleep risk.
Pearson correlations were used to examine the direct association between overall sleep risk and performance on the EF tasks. Additionally, to test the hypothesis that children from lower SES backgrounds are more susceptible to the effects of sleep problems, the interaction between sleep risk and SES in predicting EF task performance was examined.
There were no significant correlations between overall sleep risk and any of the EF tasks (.007 < r’s < .01, .74 < p’s < .89). However, when SES was examined as a moderator of these associations, several significant findings emerged (see Figure 1). For the Bird/Alligator task (a variation of the Bear/Dragon Task), the Stop-Go task, and the Snack Delay task, SES significantly moderated the association between overall sleep risk and task performance. For children from low SES backgrounds, higher overall sleep risk was associated with worse performance on these tasks.
Findings suggest that toddlers from low SES backgrounds might be especially susceptible to the effects of sleep problems, such that they show worse executive function when they experience increased sleep problems.

Authors

• Caroline Page Hoyniak, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Presenting Author

• John Bates, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maureen E. McQuillan, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Victoria J Molfese, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathleen Moritz Rudasill, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angela D. Staples, Eastern Michigan University
  Non-Presenting Author