Babies sleep for much of the day, it is a certainty. And it is also true that this is necessary for both your mental and physical development . Now, new research supports the beneficial effect of naps in the little ones. The experiment, carried out by the child and youth psychology unit of the Ruhr University of Bochum (Germany), has determined that half an hour of sleep a day helps babies – under 1 year old – to establish their knowledge and, therefore, to improve your memory.
Throughout the experiment, the children had to repeat a series of actions with puppets, four hours after having learned them for the first time. One group of babies napped after learning and another group did not. The group that had taken a nap performed better than those that had not rested and, in addition, the information still remained in their heads 24 hours later.
” Sleep improves the consolidation of declarative memory – responsible for consciously evoking data and memories – in children between six and twelve months,” explains Sabine Seehagen, leader of the study.
For this kind of natural memory training to work, babies need to fall asleep relatively soon after learning something new in order to consolidate that information in the sleep stage . During the nap, memories are encoded and transferred from the hippocampus to the neocortex, and sleeping immediately after having learned something prevents any other event from interfering with the fixation of that memory.
The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Science (PNAS) and shows, as these conclusions reveal, that napping is key to determining what babies learn .
