14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists with the University of Arizona have demonstrated in a new study that sleep spurs significant developmental gains, particularly during early childhood. This conclusion again underlines the nature of the relationship between sleep and memory, which has been the topic of much research and debate in the international scientific community for years.
The team found that infants who nap daily tend to be better than peers who do not at applying the lessons they have learned previously into new, useful skills. In preschoolers who nap, scientists noticed an increased ability to retain new knowledge learned before napping. These benefits have also been hinted at in other investigations, experts led by Rebecca Gómez, PhD, say.
The researcher says that sleep plays a critical role in underlying learning, particularly at a very young age, when the human brain is forming at a fast pace. Details of her team's study were recently presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), PsychCentral reports.
The team says that their new conclusions lend additional credence to an emerging series of researches that claim memories become reactivated during sleep, which, in turn, makes it easier for the brain to reprocess, restore, and remember them later on. On the other hand, when and how these memories get stored and activated largely remains a mystery for scientists.
“We want to show that sleep is not just a necessary evil for the organism to stay functional. Sleep is an active state that is essential for the formation of lasting memories. Sleep is a highly selective state that preferentially strengthens memories that are relevant for our future behavior,” explains scientist Susanne Diekelmann, from the University of Tübingen in Germany, and who chairs the symposium.
She goes on to say that sleep may play an important role in the brain's ability to discern universally valid, abstract, and general rules from one-time experiences. This capability enables us to deal more efficiently with similar or identical situations in the future, while also allowing the brain to save energy by not having to process the same information every time we encounter it.
Children's ability to produce valid generalizations following naps was precisely the purpose of the new study Gómez and her team conducted. “Naps soon after learning appear to be particularly important for generalization of knowledge in infants and preschoolers. Sleep is essential for extending learning to new examples,” the expert says.
In older children of preschool age, naps no longer play such an important role in forming generalizations, but rather moves to a different role, where they contribute to the permanent storage inside the brain's memory banks of whichever generalizations kids make before they nap.