Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States asked 40 pre-school children to complete a number of memory tasks in the morning.
The same tasks were repeated with some of the children after they had a nap and also with children that had been kept awake during the two hours scheduled for sleep. Children’s quality of sleep was also measured.
The findings revealed that following a nap, children recalled ten per cent more of the 'spatial locations' than they did when they hadn’t slept during the afternoon, i.e. where nine or ten items were located on a grid.
Sleep also had the greatest benefit on learning for children who napped five days or more per week on average.
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