Associations between sleep health, cognitive control, and hallucinations

Abstract Poor sleep appears to play a causal role in the development of hallucinatory experiences in clinical and non-clinical populations. It has been suggested that cognitive control processes might mediate this relationship. This investigation explored the association between hallucinatory experiences, sleep health and cognitive control within the general population. Two online studies using self-report measures and cognitive tasks were conducted to identify cognitive correlates of sleep health and hallucinatory experiences (N = 211) and investigate whether cognitive control accounted for shared variance between sleep health and hallucinatory experiences (N = 216). Both studies found that sleep health and thought control ability, but not intentional inhibition or working memory, predicted hallucinatory experiences. Further analysis showed that thought control ability accounted for significant shared variance in the association between sleep and hallucinations. Future directions and clinical implications are discussed. Pre-registrations, materials, data and code are available at doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XYU5D.