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Memory in 3‐month‐old infants benefits from a short nap
Author(s) -
Horváth Klára,
Han Benjamin,
Ujma Peter P.,
Gombos Ferenc,
Plunkett Kim
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12587
Subject(s) - nap , psychology , habituation , memory consolidation , sleep (system call) , developmental psychology , audiology , cognition , stimulus (psychology) , sleep spindle , cognitive psychology , non rapid eye movement sleep , electroencephalography , neuroscience , medicine , computer science , hippocampus , operating system
A broad range of studies demonstrate that sleep has a facilitating role in memory consolidation (see Rasch & Born, [Rasch, B., 2013]). Whether sleep‐dependent memory consolidation is also apparent in infants in their first few months of life has not been investigated. We demonstrate that 3‐month‐old infants only remember a cartoon face approximately 1.5–2 hours after its first presentation when a period of sleep followed learning. Furthermore, habituation time, that is, the time to become bored with a stimulus shown repetitively, correlated negatively with the density of infant sleep spindles, implying that processing speed is linked to specific electroencephalographic components of sleep. Our findings show that without a short period of sleep infants have problems remembering a newly seen face, that sleep enhances memory consolidation from a very early age, highlighting the importance of napping in infancy, and that infant sleep spindles may be associated with some aspects of cognitive ability.