Abstract
It is well known that the characteristics of nighttime sleep is strongly linked to cognitive abilities in daytime. However, studies
investigating the influence of poor-sleep characteristics on pre-adolescent children's cognitive abilities are relatively few. The
present study aimed at investigating the influence of night-time sleep characteristics on pre-adolescent children's cognitive
abilities by utilizing objective indicators. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the relation between attentional control ability measured
by standardized behavioral task and nighttime sleep characteristics quantified by actigraph measurement. The results revealed
a significant correlation between ability of executive attention and total sleep time, i.e. total length of uninterrupted
sleep. To be more specific, focal attention of children with long total sleep time was more easily distracted by goal-irrelevant
information than that of children with short total sleep time, which indicates that sub-component of attentional control
subserved by prefrontal cortex is particularly susceptive to sleep characteristics. The implication of this findings are discussed
in the context of previous studies on the relation between children's nighttime sleep characteristics and their cognitive functions.
