Peer-reviewed article
Sleepiness, Neuropsychological Skills, and Scholastic Learning in Children
Luigi Macchitella, Chiara Valeria Marinelli, Fulvio Signore, Enrico Ciavolino, Paola Angelelli ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how daytime sleepiness in primary school children affects their cognitive abilities and academic performance. Researchers tested 191 children using standardized neuropsychological tests and found that sleepiness was linked to problems with verbal skills and complex cognitive tasks like reading comprehension, spelling, and mathematics. However, sleepiness did not affect visuospatial abilities. The findings suggest that sleep problems in children have selective effects on certain types of thinking rather than affecting all cognitive skills equally.
Key points
- Excessive daytime sleepiness is frequent among children and adolescents and can impair neurocognitive skills and scholastic performance
- Sleepiness was associated with weaknesses in reading comprehension, oral/syntactic comprehension, spelling, and mathematics skills
- Visuospatial cognitive domains were not affected by sleepiness
- The relationship between sleepiness and cognitive abilities was selective rather than global across all skill types
- Partial least squares path modelling and bootstrap validation were used to establish statistical relationships
Limitations
The study is observational and cross-sectional, so it cannot establish whether sleepiness causes poor academic performance or whether other factors affect both. The sample is described as 'unselected' primary school children from Italy, which limits generalizability to other contexts or populations.
Abstract
Excessive daytime sleepiness is a frequent condition among children and adolescents that may lead to several and significant daytime consequences, including impaired neurocognitive skills and scholastic performance. Here, we evaluated in one hundred and ninety-one unselected primary school children, the relationship between sleepiness and a wide range of cognitive and academic skills through a standardized neuropsychological test battery. In order to assess the statistical relationship, we performed a partial least squares path modelling, a non-parametrical approach which combined a model of paths between latent variables and the coefficients between indicators and dimensions. Results were validated through the bootstrap approach and suggest that sleepiness is not associated with all cognitive and scholastic abilities, but only with those relying on verbal abilities and complex cognitive functions (i.e., reading comprehension, oral/syntactic comprehension, spelling, and mathematic skills). Our data suggest the idea that sleepiness in children is associated mostly with "higher" (mainly verbal) cognitive function(s), while the visuospatial domain was not affected.