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A new study conducted by American researchers suggests that children’s afternoon short sleep gives them better learning power.
The new study shows that naps are critical for memory consolidation and early learning among kids particularly for those who are three to-five-year-olds.
Sleep researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say an hour-long nap after lunch boosts brain power and memory in preschool children.
As the children napped, they experienced increased activity in brain spots linked with learning and integrating new information, according to the findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Our study shows that naps help the kids better remember what they are learning in preschool," the research psychologist Rebecca Spencer explained.
Spencer and her colleagues observed 40 children from six preschools across western Massachusetts and analyzed their learning power in two conditions, with nap and without nap opportunity.
While each child took part in two conditions, researchers in morning classes taught children a visual-spatial task similar to the game "Memory" In the game, kids see a grid of pictures and have to remember where different pictures are placed.
The results indicated that when children took daily nap (about 70 minutes) they performed significantly better.
Children forgot more item locations on the memory test when they had not taken a nap (65 percent accuracy), compared to when they did nap (75 percent).
"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 occur in close proximity to the learning," researchers clarified.
“While older children would naturally drop their daytime sleep, younger children should be encouraged to nap,” Spencer emphasized.
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