Page 34 - BusinessWest May 27, 2024

The Science of Naps
Research Probes Relationship Between Sleep, Memory in Infants
“The work we’ve been doing has always pointed to this interaction
of sleep and brain development. We think that kids get ready to transition out of naps when the brain is big enough to hold all the information of the day until nighttime sleep.”
AUMass Amherst sleep scientist, funded with $6.7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has launched two unprecedented studies that will track over time the brain development of infants and preschoolers to confirm the role of napping in early life and to identify the bioregulatory mechanisms involved.
Rebecca Spencer, a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences who is well-known for her groundbreak- ing research into napping, is testing her theories about what’s happening in the hippocampus — the short-term- memory area of the brain — as babies and young chil- dren undergo nap transitions.
This new research is expected to become the gold standard of scientific evidence that emphasizes the importance of healthy sleep for young children as their brains develop. The findings will help inform nap poli- cies for preschool and pre-kindergarten and be useful to teachers and parents of both neurotypical and neurodi- verse children.
“The work we’ve been doing has always pointed to this interaction of sleep and brain development,” said Spencer, who carries out research in her Somneurolab at UMass Amherst. “We think that kids get ready to tran- sition out of naps when the brain is big enough to hold all the information of the day until nighttime sleep.”
The study involving preschoolers is a collaboration between Spencer at UMass Amherst; Tracy Riggins,
a developmental psychologist specializing in memory development at the University of Maryland (UMD); and
Gregory Hancock, a UMD professor of Human Develop- ment and Quantitative Methodology. Previous research by Spencer and Riggins showed differences in the hip- pocampi of kids who nap compared to those who have transitioned out of naps.
“So far, we’ve used cross-sectional approaches,” said Spencer, referring to research that analyzes data at one point in time, as opposed to longitudinal studies that involve repeated observation over time. “We really need to show longitudinally within a child that the point when they transition out of naps is predicted by a transition in the development of their hippocampus.”
The hippocampus is the short-term location for mem- ories before they move to the cortex for long-term stor- age. Naps allow children with an immature hippocam- pus to process memories. Young children give up their afternoon nap, not based on their age, but their brain development, Spencer hypothesized.
“Naps are beneficial to everybody. Naps protect memory for everybody, no matter what age. Kids who are habitual nappers really need the nap. If they don’t nap, they get catastrophic forgetting. That’s the differ- ence between habitual and non-habitual nappers — not how good is the nap, but how bad is staying awake,” she explained.
Added Riggins, “in the end, being able to tell parents that those little deviations from routine that keep their children from napping might not have these huge impli- cations for a neurotypical child in the long run would be great. And the more we know about how the brain works
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