Day Time Nap Enhances Memory in Preschool Children

A lot of studies have emphasized the need to encourage younger children to nap. Similarly, a new study focusing on the health benefits of daytime napping revealed that it also boosts learning in preschool children.

The study, conducted by research psychologist Rebecca Spencer along with students Kasey Duclos and Laura Kurdziel, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, claims that classroom naps enhance learning in preschool children by boosting memory. They noticed that compared to children who did not nap, the kids who napped performed better on visual spatial tasks.

In young kids sleep is a major requirement for good health. During this period of life, a lot of physical and mental development takes place in a young child so naps offer the required time for growth and rejuvenation. Most of the children give up their naps at the age of five but parents should encourage them to take a nap. For a preschooler, the average daily sleep requirement is 10-12 hours at night including the afternoon nap.

The researchers observed  40 preschoolers and concluded that naps were important not only for memory consolidation but also early learning. This is the first study to provide supporting data to prove that naps are crucial for preschool children as it helps them better remember what is learnt in preschool.

The study was conducted on 40 children from different preschools across western Massachusetts. Similar to the game 'Memory' the researchers taught children a visual-spatial task in the mornings.  In the game the children were shown a grid of pictures and they had to remember where the different pictures were located. First the children were encouraged to nap during their regular classroom nap, which  lasted for an average of 77 minutes. In the second condition, the children were kept awake for the same amount of time. Their memory was tested for after the nap and when they did not take a nap. It was even tested the following day to see if  their performance was affected by night time sleep.

The researchers noticed that when the kids did not take a nap they apparently forgot the locations of most of the items on the memory test. The kids who took a nap 75 percent accurate and the the kids who did not take a nap were just 65 percent accurate.

The authors summarize, "While the children performed about the same immediately after learning in both the nap and wake conditions, the children performed significantly better when they napped both in the afternoon and the next day. That means that when they miss a nap, the child cannot recover this benefit of sleep with their overnight sleep. It seems that there is an additional benefit of having the sleep occurs in close proximity to the learning."

An additional 14 preschoolers were recruited by researchers to study the effect of sleep stages and whether memories were actively processed during nap. They measured the physiological changes during naps and found an association between brain activity linked with integrating novel data and memory benefit of sleep.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.