How does infants learn during their sleep?Exciting secrets about sleeping hours and nap

Sleep patterns change significantly with the child's growth, newborns sleep about 16 to 18 hours a day, and their sleep pattern is randomly throughout the day at the beginning, then their biological hours begin in conjunction with night and day after about 6 months.

After approximately 12 months, the infant sleeps during the night, taking two sedation during the day, and sleeping during the day is limited to one nap a day when reaching two years.

What does infants learn during sleep?

One of the infants is asleep in his cradle, wearing a rubber hat with more than 100 soft electric poles, and in the meantime, scientists monitor the winding lines that move through the computer screen that records the electrical activity of the infant's brain to find out what is happening inside it.

In a report published by the American newspaper "Washington Post", Caroline Wilck quoted William Pfeifer an developmental neurologist at the University of Colombia that the brains of newborns work during the first period of childhood to learn and adapt to everything in their surrounding environment, but the perplexing in the matter is that they areThey spend about 70% of their time asleep.

Therefore, Phaver decided with Amanda Tarolo an developmental psychologist at Boston University through this study to discover whether it was possible to determine how the learning process occurs during infants during sleep.

The researchers found that infants, whose ages do not exceed a day or two, can learn that the tone consists of a simple blow of air, and the infants are laid after hearing the tone alone, in an experience similar to the experience of the world of Russian physiology, Ivan Pavlov with dogs and how they respond to the sounds.

The importance of sleeping for learning in adults has been proven, but a little is known about the relationship between sleeping and learning in newborns, or how this relationship changes with the child's growth.

The importance of naping in the learning process

The nap periods are in particular confusing, as studies indicate that they are fundamental in the process of early learning, but most children stop naturally from taking the nap between the ages of 3 and 5 years..

Research indicates that naps are important in learning infants, and Manuella Friedrich - a neurologist at the University of Humboldt University in Berlin - says that sleep is a very important factor in the process of learning words early..

In a study published in 2015, the Frederick team presented 90 infants between the ages of 9 and 16 months, pictures of unknown things (things that look like weightlifting or complex games), with their names that were fabricated, such as "Buffle" or "Zosser".

After an hour or two, the researchers offer the infants the pictures again, either associated with the "name" of the thing or another fabricated word.

The researchers examined the electrical planning of the brain to obtain evidence indicating that infants have linked the images and the names, and a previous research has identified certain properties of the effect of the electrical planning of the brain, such as the voltage flash that appears when hearing something unexpected.

In Frederick's study, the brain planning records showed that the children who took a nap before the tests remember the word associated with the thing they had previously seen, while the infants who did not take a nap failed..

Not only that, the infants who slept a little showed the ability to classify the things they learned into categories: When you see new things similar to the things they had seen before showing the electrical planning activity of their brains that they were expecting a word they learned previously.

Frederick and her colleagues in the same study discovered that infants's ability to sort and classify information is interconnected with one of the features of the brain planning during a stage called "sleep spindle", which are rapid impulses of electrical activity, and the higher waves were recorded during the sleep spindle stage except in children who learned to generalize words.

The sleep spindle phase is often associated with slow waves fluctuating in the electrical planning of the brain, and the slow waves occur in adults only during deep sleep and are linked to the consolidation of memory, a process through which short -term memories are converted into more sustainable memories, but slow waves record in children duringSiem is more than adults.

The periods of naps help children consolidate memories at a time when they learn huge amounts of necessary information, and Simona Getty, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Davis, says that "science indicates that sleep plays a role" in early cognitive development, and it also seems that the periods of naps help childrenUnderstand the structure of the sentence.

The cognitive psychologist Rebecca Gomez of Arizona University in Toxon and her colleagues presented a group of words to a group of children between the ages of 15 and 48 months, and it was found that children who took a nap showed a higher ability to understand patterns.

The periods of naps help older children to learn beyond the language. In a study published in 2020, Rebecca Spencer, a cognitive neurologist at the University of Massachusetts Ammest,, and graduate student Sana Lakandwalla, imitated the activity of the nursery, such as writing many books that tell a short storyAbout a day in the zoo, and in the Spencer Laboratory, a researcher read these books for children between the ages of 3 and 6, pointing to the pictures.

Immediately after reading the story, the researchers asked the children to put a set of pictures of books, then some children slept for up to two hours, while others remained awake, and the researchers found that children who enjoyed a nap remembered the greatest arrangement of events in the memory test compared to the second group, and these childrenThey performed better in the same test the next day.

Why does the child stop taking nap?

When children refrain from taking a nap, their performance was worse in memory tests, but with growth, children gradually stop taking a nap, and this may be attributed - according to Spencer - to the development of the brain and the adoption of the learning process less on sleep.

A study between Spencer and Terry Regens - a developmental neurologist at the University of Maryland at College Park - focuses on the function of the Qarn Amon area responsible for the creation of new memories using magnetic resonance imaging of children's brains.

Spencer and Rigz assume that it is the development of the Amon Qarn region that explains the gradual abandonment of the nap.

Research conducted with laboratory animals and humans adults indicates that the Amon Qarn area is working on short -term storage for new information, then these memories are transferred to the cerebral cortex to store them for a longer period.

Spencer is likened to the Amon Qarn area in the bucket, and early on the development is a small memory bucket, so it must be emptied frequently during sleep, and that is through naps, and with the development of this region, the child's ability to learn as well..