REVIEW OF ADOLESCENT-SLEEP MANIPULATIONS AND OUTCOMES

Abstract

The changes in sleep patterns of adolescents and the effects they have on cognitive performance are reviewed in this study. Globally, adolescents go to bed later and wake up early, which results in them losing hours of sleep. To investigate the effects this sleep loss has on cognition a literature review was performed using studies that restricted or extended sleep duration of adolescents. Eleven studies that used objective measures of sleep and measured cognitive performances were qualitatively reviewed. The results suggest a detrimental effect of adolescent sleep loss on (simple) attention, as well as selective effects on working memory, short-term memory, and reasoning. Adolescent sleep gain is suggested to have the opposite effect in most of these domains. Studies that investigated the long-term memory effects of sleep are inconclusive. The experimental studies were furthermore evaluated and recommendations for future research are to include objective sleep measures, use cross-over and repeated measurement experimental designs, perform power analyses, and report pubertal-development stages of the studied sample. Because of the limited number of studies with reliable results it is yet to early to compare the effects of sleep loss during adolescence with those during adulthood.