Effects of dawn simulation on attentional performance in adolescents

Purpose This study aimed at examining the effects of 2 weeks of dawn simulation on attentional performance in adolescents. Methods On the whole, 56 adolescents (24 females and 32 males) took part to the study, with a mean age of 17.68 ± 0.97 years (age ranging between 15 and 20 years). Each adolescent was requested to participate for 5 consecutive weeks and the research design included the baseline and two counterbalanced conditions, dawn simulator and control (no dawn simulator). Attentional performance of adolescents was measured through the attention network test (ANT) that allowed assessing the efficiency of three separable attentional networks, namely alerting, orienting and executive. Overall, participants performed the ANT three times (i.e., one time for each condition), while sleep quality, sleep duration and sleep timing were concurrently monitored by means of actigraphy and were treated as potential confounders. Results The only improvement of the attentional performance attributable to the use of dawn simulator was observed for the efficiency of alerting network (45.97 ± 32.76 ms) that significantly increased in comparison to the baseline (31.57 ± 26.97 ms) (p < 0.05). On the contrary, the sleep quality, sleep quantity and sleep timing did not significantly change. Conclusion These results show for the first time that, controlling for sleep quality, sleep duration and sleep timing, the use of dawn simulator across 2 weeks is able to determine an alerting effect in adolescents.