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SINGAPORE: Napping as part of a daily program “significantly improves learning and memory” for adolescents, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found.
A study conducted in participants aged 15-19 years showed that napping could be beneficial, regardless of whether the participants got enough sleep in a 24-hour period.
Over two weeks, a shorter period of sleep at night and an afternoon nap led to “significant gains” in memory performance in the afternoon, NUS said in a press release on Wednesday (March 17).
“Fundamentally, the reduction in nighttime sleep associated with this ‘split sleep schedule’ did not affect learning in the morning,” the university said.
“Analysis of EEG recordings of brain activity during sleep suggested that the additional opportunity to engage in slow wave sleep during naps might have contributed to this benefit.”
The university said that while the memory benefits of daytime naps are well known, naps have generally been studied as a sole adjunct to nighttime sleep, rather than as part of a regular sleep schedule.
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Since many students in this age group do not get enough sleep, the researchers wanted to investigate how different ways of distributing sleep over 24 hours could affect learning, the university added.
RESEARCH CARRIED OUT WITH FOUR GROUPS
The researchers conducted two 15-day studies with 112 participants at a boarding school. The participants were divided into four groups.
The first factor examined was whether the students slept at least eight hours and thus got enough sleep, or whether they had six and a half hours, the number of hours of sleep “restricted to a level common in the local adolescent population.
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The second factor examined was whether sleep was continuous at night or divided between sleeping at night and a one-and-a-half hour nap in the afternoon.
Your long-term memory was assessed in two ways. The first was an image coding task, which involved looking at 160 images. All 160 images were presented again, but with another 80 randomly added to the mix. Students were asked to indicate their confidence that the images were old or new on a five-point scale.
The second involved an “educationally realistic fact-finding task” that involved learning facts about various species of amphibians.
Split sleep improved afternoon performance for both memory tasks, regardless of whether the participants had sleep restrictions or were well rested. Polysomnography sleep monitoring showed a reduced accumulation of sleep pressure during the night with the divided sleep schedule.
The researchers suggested that slow-wave sleep during naps can scale down synapses that are crucial for learning, updating them to more effectively encode new information afterward.
“Alternatively, it could be that the reactivation of memory during nap reorganizes the information learned in the morning, so that there is effectively more room to learn new information in the afternoon,” said NUS.
“Regardless of the actual mechanisms, the findings suggest that regular nap opportunities in schools can provide sufficient sleep and improve learning outcomes.”
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The study’s principal investigator, Professor Michael Chee, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, added: “Demonstrating the benefit of a split sleep schedule of several nights in memory into two Different homework on the same students is a unique finding and should persuade educators to take nap measures. “
Dr. James Cousins and Dr. Ruth Leong were “the main contributors” to the study, NUS said. The study was funded by the National Council for Medical Research, the National Research Foundation, and the Far East and Lee Foundations.
