Go to Sleep! A Good Night's Rest Helps Learning in Children, According to a New Study

Ever wish you could learn while sleeping? Apparently you can. Sleep actually reinforces learning in children and turns subconsciously learned material into active knowledge, according to a new study.

The research, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, examined children's ability to form explicit knowledge through an implicitly-learned motor task. The researchers had children between the ages of eight and 11 in addition to young adults learn to guess a predetermined series of actions. The participants were unaware of the existence of the series itself, though. In this way, the scientists could test subconscious learning. Following a night of sleep or a day awake, the memories of both the children and young adults were tested.

The researchers found that after a night of sleep, both age groups could remember a larger number of elements from the series than those who had remained awake during the time between the testing. The scientists also discovered that, in fact, the children were much better at it than the young adults.

Yet these findings weren't completely surprising. Previous studies of adults have shown that sleeping after learning supports long-term storage of the material learned. During sleep, memory is turned into a form that makes future learning easier, and implicit knowledge becomes explicit. This makes the knowledge more easily transferrable to other areas.

So why are children better at it than adults? The lead researcher for the study, Ines Wilhelm, has an explanation. In a press release, she said, "In children, much more efficient explicit knowledge is generated during sleep from a previously learned implicit task. The formation of explicit knowledge appears to be a very specific ability of childhood sleep, since children typically benefit as much or less than adults from sleep when it comes to other types of memory tasks." The fact that children sleep longer and deeper also may have contributed to why they were better and the series.

The study shows how crucial it is for children to get a good night's sleep. Since many children go to school each day and must process vast amounts of information, going to bed on time is important for them to do well. The study also shows that pulling all-nighters to cram for tests may not be the best policy for learning the material.