Associations of sleep trajectory and metacognitive outcomes

Abstract

The relationship between sleep and higher-order cognitive functions has been widely debated. Metacognition is one of the constructs that has seen increased popularity in recent years given its implications in artificial intelligence, but the role of sleep in influencing metacognitive functioning has received limited attention, with the findings mostly cross-sectional. The primary objectives of this thesis include attempting to replicate previous findings of association between age and sleep, utilising a 3-day actigraph habitual sleep period and a 9-year database of sleep variables to predict various cognitive and metacognitive outcomes, comparing cognitive and metacognitive outcomes of sleep quality trajectory groups, and exploring potential evidence of domain-specificity of metacognition. The results indicated that age was unrelated to total sleep time. Furthermore, both objective and self-reported sleep duration could not predict vigilance, attention, working memory, and metacognitive outcomes. The cognitive task performance was comparable between participants belonging in different sleep quality trajectory groups. Finally, correlational analysis of metacognitive efficiency in the working memory and the attention task could partially support the domain-specific argument of metacognition. Overall, this thesis has two major findings, habitual sleep duration and long-term sleep quality differences may have limited impact on lab-based cognitive task performances, and the cognitive task results lended partial support to the domain-specific argument for metacognition.