Skipping nap time can be detrimental to early childhood memory development according to a new study.
Rebecca Gómez of the University of Arizona presented her new work on how sleep enable babies and young children to learn language over time at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting in Boston today.
“Sleep plays a crucial role in learning from early development,” Gómez says. Her research, part of a symposium on sleep and memory, examines how infants can recognize similar instances and apply previous knowledge to a new situation. Language examples include learning the same letter in different fonts, or understanding the same word said by different people.
Gómez’s work found that infants who napped were better able to apply previous lessons learned to new skills. In one study Gómez played infants an artificial language and tested whether the children recognized the new vocabulary after being awake or taking a nap. Babies who napped were able to apply the language rules they learned prior to napping and use them to recognize brand new sentences in the novel language.
The study also examined the relation of memory to sleep in preschoolers who it found were better able to retain what they had learned after napping. “Preschoolers with more mature memory structures do not appear to form generalizations during sleep; however, naps appear to be necessary for retaining a generalization they form before a nap,” Gómez says.
“Sleep is an active state that is essential for the formation of lasting memories,” says Susan Diekelmann who is chairing the symposium. Diekelmann’s research explores how sleep affects our memory of our own intentions, such as remembering to drop a letter in a mailbox on the way home.
In one of her studies two groups of subject were told to remember word pairs and asked to recall them two days later. Half of the subjects were kept awake on the first night while the other half slept. When asked to recall the word pairs while performing other challenging tasks the group that slept could automatically recall the words whereas the ones who stayed awake had much more difficulty.
“The likelihood that we remember to execute our intentions at the appropriate time in the future is substantially higher if we have had a good night’s sleep after having formed the intention,” Diekelmann says.