Napping helps children to learn

According to the University of Sheffield and Ruhr University in Germany, napping helps children to develop their memory and retain new behaviours they have learnt.

A team of researchers from the universities tested the ability of 216 six-to 12-month-olds to recall newly learned skills.

The children were shown how to remove and manipulate a mitten from a hand puppet, and given the chance to reproduce these actions after a period of four and 24 hours.

To determine whether taking a nap after learning made any difference to children being able to retain the new skills, the behaviours of children who did not take a nap were compared to those who napped for at least 30 minutes within four hours of learning.

They found that only children who had napped after the learning activity remembered the actions, while those who hadn’t napped didn’t.

Naps of shorter than 30 minutes did not provide sufficient time for children to consolidate their knowledge so it could be retained over the long-term.

After 24 hours, children in the napping group were also significantly better able to recall the new actions than those who did not take a nap.

Dr Jane Herbert from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Psychology (pictured), said, ‘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.

‘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.’

She added, ‘Parents receive lots of advice about what they should and shouldn’t do with their baby’s sleep schedule.

‘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.’

• The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.