ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Aging Neurosci.
Sec. Neurocognitive Aging and Behavior
This article is part of the Research TopicSleep and cognition: The role of sleep patterns and deprivation in memory and learningView all 7 articles
Nightly variations in sleep quality and next-day cognitive performance: an in-home study in healthy older adults
Provisionally accepted
- 1Concordia Univeristy, Montreal, Canada
- 2McGill University, Montreal, Canada
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Sleep quality is often thought to be a key determinant of cognitive performance, particularly in older adults who experience age-related changes in sleep architecture. However, the extent to which nightly variations in sleep quality impact next-day cognitive performance remains unclear - in part because it has only recently become a practical possibility to measure sleep over multiple nights. In this study, we used an in-home wearable electroencephalography (EEG) device to monitor sleep patterns over ∼10 nights in 17 healthy older adults, assessing metrics of sleep quality such as 'wake after sleep onset' and the density of slow oscillations and spindles. Next-day cognitive performance was evaluated using two computerized neuropsychological tasks measuring executive functions (inhibition and cognitive flexibility), and their relationships to sleep metrics were explored. Although participants placed the EEG device themselves, we found that a high proportion of sleep data was usable (∼71%), and captured clear nightly variations in sleep quality. Sleep recordings showed considerable variability in sleep quality metrics across nights, with large inter-individual differences. However, we found no effects of either macro-or microarchitectural sleep metrics on executive task outcomes the following day. Although these results do not rule out the possibility that some aspects of cognitive performance may be affected by daily fluctuations in sleep quality, they suggest that inhibition and cognitive flexibility, which underlie reasoning and problem solving, may be relatively resilient to nightly sleep variability in older adults. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using emerging portable devices to extend sleep studies at home and over multiple nights in older adults, while providing essential variance components and effect size estimates to guide sample size planning for future studies.
Keywords: Aging, Cognition, sleep quality, Sleep variability, wearables
Received: 26 Sep 2025; Accepted: 16 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Brooks, El Chami, Jourde, Savard and Coffey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mary Brooks
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