According to the investigation of a team of sleep experts from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, United States, naps taken during the day in the classroom support the learning of preschoolers By improving your memory. In their study, those who slept for a while during the day performed significantly better visual-spatial tasks in the afternoon compared to those who did not enjoy that sleep time.
"We are the first to report evidence that naps are important for preschoolers. Naps help children remember better what they are learning in preschool," says study director Rebecca Spencer, published in 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'.
The study
Spencer and his colleagues recruited 40 children from six preschools throughout western Massachusetts and taught them a visual-spatial task similar to memory games. In this game, children saw a grid of images and had to remember where the different images are.
Each child participated in two conditions: after a nap and without sleep. The naps lasted an average of 77 minutes, the same time they stayed awake when they did not take a nap. Thus, the memory game was tested with and without a nap and, again, the next day to see if nighttime sleep affects performance.
Children forgot significantly more locations of items in the memory test when they had not taken a nap (65 percent accuracy), compared to when they slept during the day (75 percent accuracy), so that after a nap, the children remembered 10 percent more of the test points than when they stayed awake.
To study the effect of the sleep phases and if the memories were actively processed during the nap, the scientists recruited an additional group of 14 preschoolers who went to a sleep laboratory who underwent polysomnography, a record of the changes biophysiological, during his average naps of 73 minutes. Spencer and his colleagues observed a correlation between spindle sleep density, which is the activity related to the integration of new information, and the memory benefit during a nap.
The data of this work could have important implications in the education programs of many countries, including Spain, where school naps have been phased out for courses of 3 to 5 years, because there is little scientific information in this regard and due to the increase in curricular requirements.
The study, confirms in the smallest, what was already known in the elderly, and that is that a nap not only feels good but also helps our brain. For one thing we have good in this country, I hope that the government devotes as much effort and money in maintaining this millenary tradition as it is doing with much less beneficial ones.
At the moment here we have this study confirming that The nap improves the learning of the preschooler.
What do you think, do you think the nap is so important?
