Napping helps infants’ memory development

Babies learn best when they are sleepy Daytime naps of 30 minutes or more help infants to retain and remember new behaviours Bedtime stories are invaluable for a child's development - Napping helps infants to develop their memory and retain new behaviours they have learnt, a new study from the University of Sheffield has revealed. Babies devote the majority of their time to sleeping, but until now very little was known about the links between sleep and the unprecedented levels of growth and development that take place during their first year of life. In a study, which is the first of its kind, researchers from the University of Sheffield and Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, found that the notion of 'sleeping like a baby' is extremely important in declarative memory consolidation - such as retaining facts, events and knowledge. Researchers explored whether daytime sleep after learning helped babies to remember new behaviour. The study focused on 216 healthy six to 12 month-old infants and tested their ability to recall newly learned skills. The youngsters were shown how to remove and manipulate a mitten from a hand puppet and were given the opportunity to reproduce these actions after delays of four and 24 hours. Infants who did not nap after learning were compared with age-matched infants who napped for at least 30 minutes within four hours of learning the target actions.