article
Naps in school can enhance the duration of declarative memories learned by adolescents
Fecha
2014-06-03Registro en:
Lemos N, Weissheimer J and Ribeiro S (2014) Naps in school can enhance the duration of declarative memories learned by adolescents. Front. Syst. Neurosci. 8:103. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2014.00103
Autor
Lemos, Nathalia
Weissheimer, Janaina
Ribeiro, Sidarta Tollendal Gomes
Resumen
Sleep helps the consolidation of declarative memories in the laboratory, but the
pro-mnemonic effect of daytime naps in schools is yet to be fully characterized. While
a few studies indicate that sleep can indeed benefit school learning, it remains unclear
how best to use it. Here we set out to evaluate the influence of daytime naps on the
duration of declarative memories learned in school by students of 10–15 years old. A total
of 584 students from 6th grade were investigated. Students within a regular classroom
were exposed to a 15-min lecture on new declarative contents, absent from the standard
curriculum for this age group. The students were then randomly sorted into nap and
non-nap groups. Students in the nap group were conducted to a quiet room with mats,
received sleep masks and were invited to sleep. At the same time, students in the non-nap
group attended regular school classes given by their usual teacher (Experiment I), or
English classes given by another experimenter (Experiment II). These 2 versions of the
study differed in a number of ways. In Experiment I (n = 371), students were pre-tested
on lecture-related contents before the lecture, were invited to nap for up to 2 h, and after 1,
2, or 5 days received surprise tests with similar content but different wording and question
order. In Experiment II (n = 213), students were invited to nap for up to 50 min (duration
of a regular class); surprise tests were applied immediately after the lecture, and repeated
after 5, 30, or 110 days. Experiment I showed a significant ∼10% gain in test scores for
both nap and non-nap groups 1 day after learning, in comparison with pre-test scores. This
gain was sustained in the nap group after 2 and 5 days, but in the non-nap group it decayed
completely after 5 days. In Experiment II, the nap group showed significantly higher scores
than the non-nap group at all times tested, thus precluding specific conclusions. The
results suggest that sleep can be used to enhance the duration of memory contents
learned in school.