Napping may boost babies’ learning skills
Infants tend to nap for the most part of the day – and for a good reason. On average, infants aged 3-11 months have around one to four naps a day, each lasting 30 minutes to 2 hours. Now, a new study finds these daytime naps may be key to a child’s development, helping them remember newly learned skills and behaviour.
The team set out to assess how sleep affected the learning and memory skills of 216 healthy infants aged 6 and 12 months.
The best learning time for infants is just before a nap
For their study, the researchers made two visits to each infants’ home – either straight after they had slept or just before they were expected to fall asleep.
On the first visit, the researchers conducted a learning task, which involved showing the infants how to remove and play with a mitten that had been placed on a hand puppet.
On the second visit – either 4 or 24 hours later – the researchers monitored how the infants reacted to seeing the mitten-wearing hand puppet again. Specifically, they wanted to see whether the infants would try to remove and play with the mitten, indicating they had processed and remembered these actions from the learning task.
The researchers found that infants who had at least a 30-minute nap within 4 hours of the learning task remembered to remove and play with the hand puppet’s mitten on the second visit. Infants of the same age who did not nap after the learning task, however, were not able to perform these actions, suggesting they did not remember the learning task.
