Probably us too, but Laboratory Equipment is only looking at the way babies need naps to remember new things:
In a study, which is the first of its kind, researchers from the Univ. of Sheffield and Ruhr Univ. Bochum, Germany, found that the notion of “sleeping like a baby” is extremely important in declarative memory consolidation — such as retaining facts, events and knowledge.
Researchers explored whether daytime sleep after learning helped babies to remember new behavior. The study focused on 216 healthy six to 12 month-old infants and tested their ability to recall newly learned skills.
The youngsters were shown how to remove and manipulate a mitten from a hand puppet and were given the opportunity to reproduce these actions after delays of four and 24 hours.
Infants who did not nap after learning were compared with age-matched infants who napped for at least 30 minutes within four hours of learning the target actions.
The study, which is published in PNAS, showed that only infants who had napped after the learning activity remembered the target actions while those who hadn’t napped showed no evidence of remembering the new information and behavior.
After a 24 hour delay children in the napping group also exhibited significantly better recall compared with infants in the no-nap group.