Infants remember activities best when they happen just before nap-time, according to a new study.
A team of researchers from the University of Sheffield in Germany looked at more than 200 six to 12-month-old infants to explore how daytime napping helps babies learn new behaviors.
The babies were taught how to remove and manipulate a mitten from a hand puppet. They were asked to reproduce the actions after delays of four and 24-hours-later.
A group of infants who napped right after learning the new skill were compared with infants who did not nap.
Those who took the nap after learning remembered the activity significantly better than those who went nap-free.
"Until now people have presumed that the best time for infants to learn is when they are wide-awake, rather than when they are starting to feel tired, but our results show that activities occurring just before infants have a nap can be particularly valuable and well-remembered," the researchers wrote in the study.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
