Does Prior Night’s Sleep Impact Next Day’s Executive Functioning? It Depends on an Individual’s Average Sleep Quality

Executive functioning (EF) is a series of fundamental goal-directed cognitive abilities that enable effective learning. Differences in daily sleep quality may covary with fluctuations in EF among youth. Most studies linking sleep to EF rely on between-person differences and average effects for the sample. This study employed an intensive longitudinal design and examined the within-person relations between self-reported prior night’s sleep quality and next day’s EF. Students from Grades 4 to 12 (M age= 14.60, SD = 2.53) completed three behavioral EF tasks repeatedly across approximately one semester. The final analytic sample included 2898 observations embedded in 73 participants. Although, on average, sleep did not significantly covary with EF, there was heterogeneity in within-person sleep-EF relations. Moreover, individuals’ average sleep quality moderated within-person effects. For individuals with low mean sleep quality, a better-than-usual sleep quality was linked to better EF performance. However, for individuals with high mean sleep quality, better-than-usual sleep quality was linked to worse EF performance. Understanding person-specific relations between sleep and EF can help educators optimize EF and learning on a daily basis and produce positive academic outcomes across longer time periods.