Overview
- Researchers using wearable actigraphy measured sleep in 379 preschool children and found that greater variability in sleep midpoint, sleep duration, and higher social jet lag were each linked to lower receptive vocabulary scores.
- Visuospatial memory was associated with variability in sleep midpoint and with social jet lag but showed no link to variation in sleep duration in the smaller subsample tested.
- Children's executive attention did not show significant associations with any measure of sleep variability in this study.
- Average fluctuation in the sample was about 60 minutes for sleep duration and about 32 minutes for sleep midpoint, and the authors controlled for total sleep time so the effects reflect schedule regularity rather than hours slept.
- The results are reported in a conference abstract supported by the NIH and will be presented at SLEEP 2026, and the authors caution that observational design and smaller subsamples for some tests mean further peer-reviewed publication and replication are needed before drawing causal conclusions.