Half an hour of sleep helps children under one year of age to consolidate their knowledge.
Children who enjoy this little break not only retain information better, but they remember it 24 hours later.
Human babies spend a large portion of their time sleeping. Sleep is essential for the physical and mental development of the child; however, little is known about its specific functions in the first year of life. According to an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), napping is key to fixing what babies learn. Sleep improves the consolidation of your declarative memory “Sleep improves the consolidation of declarative memory – responsible for consciously evoking data and memories – in children between six and twelve months old,” Sabine Seehagen, a researcher in child and youth psychology at the Ruhr University of Bochum (Germany) and lead author of the study, explains to SINC.
The children participating in the research team’s experiments had to repeat certain actions with puppets four hours after they had first learned them. Those who slept for at least half an hour in that interval had better results and, in addition, continued to retain the information 24 hours later. According to the researchers, sleep prevents other events from interfering with the fixation of memory, but not only that, “thanks to sleep, an important process of memory strengthening is set in motion.” To do this, babies need to fall asleep relatively soon after learning the novel information.
While the child sleeps, memories are encoded and transferred from the hippocampus – the part of the brain involved in immediate memory – to the neocortex – an area involved in long-term memory. “It is possible that in the brain of babies, the hippocampus has a very limited capacity and sleeping is its way of downloading information into the neocortex before forgetting it,” adds the researcher.
Researchers say that there is an overall beneficial effect of napping throughout life. “In addition to helping to consolidate and strengthen memory, sleep is used to analyze problems and find new solutions,” says Seehagen.
During these breaks, children this young rarely reach the deep sleep phase. For the researchers, a future line of research would be to find out if, as with adults, deep sleep is related to the memory of babies.
The study also does not make it clear whether there are differences between resting in the morning or in the afternoon. In addition, future research will have to clarify “whether sleep only impacts memory capacity in babies or if it also affects the way they use the information collected,” concludes Seehagen.
Source: 20 minutes
