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Completed Grants
Variability in Sleep and Cognition in Older Adults (IIV)
The goal of the IIV study is to establish the connection between sleep and cognition. Although older adults with insomnia frequently complain of impaired cognitive functioning, objective evidence of such impairment is sparse. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that the lack of evidence may be attributable to the use of correlational research designs that utilize 'one shot' assessments which do not fully capture day-to-day variability in sleep and cognition. The IIV project is an intense study of sleep and cognition on a daily basis and aims to provide greater insight into their relationship.
The project is highly innovative, because it is the first to use advanced statistical modeling techniques to capture the dynamic relationship between sleep and cognition over the course of a behavioral intervention. Importantly, the findings of the study may have significant clinical implications, because they may demonstrate that behavioral intervention for insomnia improves both sleep and cognitive functioning. To gain further insight into the sleep/cognition relationship, future work in this area will involve increased methodological sophistication (i.e., polysomnography or sleep EEG as an outcome, fMRI).