Power Nap

(National) March 5, 2007 - Nap time can be a battle, but a nap may help your child learn.

We've all heard the statistics about the importance of sleep, but what about naps? Dr. Rebecca Gomez says, "We're finding that naps are crucial for learning."

Psychologists at the University of Arizona are studying the connection between a quick snooze and learning. Dr. Lynn Nadel talks about the research, "Our goal in general is to sort of understand how infants learn, how they acquire any knowledge whatsoever."

Dr. Gomez says, "What we found is that their learning is transformed with sleep."

In their study, 15-month-olds were exposed to an artificial language. It sounds like nonsense to adults, but Dr. Gomez, who created the language, says it's a great learning tool for infants. "We have rules like that in natural language where we have to keep track of information in the beginning of a sentence and information at the end."

The babies are exposed to the artificial language during 15 minutes of play time. Then half of the participants take a nap, the others do not. Four hours later, they're all tested to see what they've learned.

Dr. Gomez is seeing a difference in the babies who slept, "What we're finding is that sleep transforms the memory in some way so that infants can actually recognize new sentences."

The infants who didn't have a nap only recognized the words that were heard during playtime. Parents like Autumn Haworth are taking these early results to heart. "I never really understood how important naps were, um, for like the mental aspect of his learning and growth. So definitely I'm going to try not to miss his naps."

The results have prompted the doctors to do further studies on the importance of sleep in learning. For more information on the sleep study you can click here>>