A daytime nap or two is an essential part of every baby's daily routine. These naps allow newborns and toddlers the needed downtime to help them cope with crucial physical and mental developments that happen at this stage in a child's development. But researchers now believe that a daily nap will do much more than just help infants cope with the stresses of development. New research reveals that a daytime nap is vital in helping boost a baby's memory, as well.
In the first study of its kind, a team at the University of Sheffield and Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany has identified a link between sleep and babies' development during their first year of life. Their findings revealed that a half an hour nap each day could boost a baby's memory, helping them learn faster and retain the new skills they have learned.
The study focused on 216 healthy six to 12-month old babies and tested their abilities to recall newly learned skills. The babies were shown how to remove and manipulate a mitten on a hand puppet, and were given the opportunity to reproduce these actions after four and then 24 hours. The infants who did not nap after learning the skill were compared with age-matched babies that did nap for at least thirty minutes within four hours of learning the new skills.
The experiment found only the infants who had napped after learning the new activity remembered the new skills, while those that hadn't slept showed no evidence of remembering the activity at all.
"These findings are particularly interesting to both parents and educationalists because they suggest that the optimal time for infants to learn new information is just before they have a sleep" researcher from the University of Sheffiels department of psychology, Dr. Jane Herbert says. "Until now people have presumed that the best time for infants to learn is when they are wide-awake, rather than when they are starting to feel tired, but our results show that activities occurring just before infants have a nap can be particularly valuable and well-remembered."
Naps shorter than 30 minutes were not found to provide sufficient time for the infants to consolidate their knowledge to a point where it could be retained in the long term.
"Parents receive lots of advice about what they should and shouldn't do with their baby's sleep schedule," Herbert says. "This study however examined learning opportunities around naturally occurring naps and shows just how valuable activities like reading books with young children just before they go down to sleep can be."
Researchers plan further study to examine whether sleep not only enhances the quantity of a baby's memory but also the quality of memory, or how the recollections are used.
