Naps Enhance Preschoolers' Learning Skills

Latest study by researchers  from the  University of Massachusetts Amherst states that midday naps can boost learning in preschool children.  

Classroom naps can enhance children's memory, the study noted. They found that children who napped were better at visual-spatial tasks in the afternoon after a nap and the next day than those who did not sleep.

For the study, the researchers examined 40 children preschoolers across western Massachusetts. They were trained in a visual-spatial game. These children were told to see a grid of pictures and asked to remember the locations of the pictures.

The children were divided into two groups. In the first group, the children were encouraged to nap during their regular classroom nap times for an average 77 minutes. In the second group, children were kept awake for the same amount of time. They were later told to play the visual-spatial game.

The study results showed that 65 percent of children who did not sleep in the afternoon failed to locate the pictures. Nearly 75 percent of the children who took a nap remembered the location of the pictures.

"While the children performed about the same immediately after learning in both the nap and wake conditions, the children performed significantly better when they napped both in the afternoon and the next day," researchers wrote in the study. "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."

In order to see the effect of sleep stages and whether memories were actively developed during the nap, researchers studied another 14 preschoolers who came to a sleep lab and had polysomnography, a record of biophysiological changes, during their average 73-minute naps. They found a link between sleep spindle density, or activity associated with integrating new information, and the memory benefit of sleep during the nap.

"Until now, there was nothing to support teachers who feel that naps can really help young children. There had been no concrete science behind that," Research psychologist Rebecca Spencer said in a news release. "We hope these results will be by policy makers and center directors to make educated decisions regarding the nap opportunities in the classrooms. Children should not only be given the opportunity, they should be encouraged to sleep by creating an environment which supports sleep."