Association of sleep spindle activity with executive functioning and intellectual ability in children and adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY OBJECTIVES: Sleep spindles have been studied as an underlying mechanism of cognition. Prior research primarily relied on experimental studies of selective samples of healthy youth. We tested the relationship between spindle activity and cognition in youth from the general population. METHODS: Eight hundred and ninety-two sleep electroencephalographies (EEGs) from 9-hour polysomnography were leveraged from 456 typically developing children (median 8 years), and 258 typically developing adolescents (median 16 years) and youth with unmedicated psychiatric/behavioral disorders (89 children; 89 adolescents). Multivariable-adjusted linear regression models examined associations between sleep spindle density (SSD; number/minute) and peak spindle frequency (PSF; 10-16 Hz range) during N2 with Wechsler indices of processing speed, working memory, verbal intelligence, and nonverbal intelligence. We first analyzed typically developing and unmedicated psychiatric/behavioral youth, followed by an analysis of the 47 unmedicated attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) subgroup. RESULTS: In typically developing children, higher SSD and PSF were associated with better working memory and verbal intelligence. In adolescents, higher SSD was associated with better working memory and nonverbal intelligence, while slower PSF was associated with better nonverbal intelligence. Longitudinally, higher childhood SSD was associated with better adolescent nonverbal intelligence among typically developing youth. In youth with unmedicated psychiatric/behavioral disorders, spindle-cognition associations were lost, except in ADHD, where higher childhood SSD and slower adolescent PSF supported working memory. CONCLUSION: Sleep spindles may serve as a biomarker for neural and cognitive maturation, with developmental differences reflecting key brain maturational changes from childhood to adolescence. While altered in unmedicated psychiatric/behavioral disorders, lower-frequency spindles may provide a protective mechanism for working memory in adolescents with ADHD. Statement of Significance Sleep spindles occur as bursts of activity in the sigma-frequency range during non-rapid eye movement sleep. Due to their thalamocortical origin, spindles have been linked to cognitive functioning. We examined spindle activity in typically developing youth and unmedicated youth with psychiatric/behavioral disorders. In typically developing children, higher spindle density was associated with better verbal intelligence and, as they transitioned to adolescence, with better nonverbal intelligence. In unmedicated children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), lower-frequency spindles were associated with better working memory in adolescence. Sleep spindles promote neural plasticity for cognitive growth, with reduced impact in later developmental stages reflecting matured neural pathways. In youth with ADHD, sleep spindles may serve a protective role in mitigating cognitive deficits over time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".