Do you remember taking naps when you were little? It’s interesting that as you become older, the attitude towards napping changes from finding it troublesome to wishing to be able to nap everyday. Unfortunately, growing older means significantly less time available for napping. But what does napping actually do? A recent study takes a look at the effects of napping on infants; although the results may not reveal the effects of napping in general, the study still provides information that may be useful to parents.
Image source: Alexandra Grablewski
Researchers discovered that napping enables infants to develop their memories and recall recently learned things. The study was conducted on about 200 six to twelve month-old infants and aimed to test these infants’ abilities to recall recently learned information. The infants were each shown specific actions made on a puppet and were asked to reproduce them after four hours and again after twenty-four hours. The results were that the infants who took 30 minutes or longer naps within four hours of being shown the actions were able to recall those actions while the infants who didn’t nap were unable to. After twenty-four hours, the infants who napped were again significantly better able to recall what they learned compared to the infants who didn’t nap.
The results of this study may be most applicable to parents of infants; these results suggest that the best time for infants to learn may not actually be when they are actively awake, but when they are just about to fall asleep. As a result, reading bedtime stories to young children just before they sleep may stimulate learning better than reading them stories during the day. This study has shown that napping benefits the quantity of infant memories but further research needs to be done in order to figure out the effects of napping on the quality of infant memories.
Feature Image Source: Happy Outdoor Baby by Jeremy Salmon
