Napping May be Good for Children's Brains: Babies Remember More After Naps

Napping may be good for the brain. Scientists found that napping helps infants develop their memory and retain new behaviors that they have learned, showing the importance of allowing children to sleep.

Babies devote the majority of their time to sleeping. Until now, though, scientists have been unsure about the links between sleep and the unprecedented levels of growth and development that take place during their first year of life. That's why researchers decided to investigate a bit further.

In this case, the researchers focused on 216 health infants between the ages of six to 12 months. They showed the children how to remove and manipulate a mitten from a hand puppet, and then were given the opportunity to reproduce these actions after delays of four and 24 hours. The scientists compared infants who did not nap after learning with age-matched infants who napped for at least 30 minutes within four hours after learning.

So what did they find? It turns out that infants that napped after learning remembered the actions. Those that didn't hap showed no evidence of remembering the new information and behavior. After 24 hours, the children that napped also showed significantly better recall.

"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," said Jane Herbert, one of the researchers, in a news release. "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."

The findings reveal the importance of naps for children. It also shows that when teaching infants new behaviors, right before naptime may be the best time to do so.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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