ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
REM sleep in naps differentially relates to memory consolidation in typical preschoolers and children with Down syndrome.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Children with typical development or Down syndrome benefit from testing versus restudy of arbitrary event sequences across long-term delays and in the face of sleep disturbance.Journal of pediatric neuropsychology · 2025Article
- Neuronal oscillations in cognition: Down syndrome as a model of mouse to human translation.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2025Review
- No effect of napping on episodic foresight and prospective memory in kindergarten children.Journal of sleep research · 2025Article
- The enhancement of nodal properties in the dorsal visual pathway is associated with compensatory mechanisms of visuospatial cognitive abilities following total sleep deprivation.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- A Developmental Social Neuroscience Perspective on Infant Autism Interventions.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2023Article
- Relations between sleep patterns early in life and brain development: A review.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Review
- Nap effects on preschool children's learning of letter-sound mappings.Child development · 2022Article
- Circadian Sleep-Activity Rhythm across Ages in Down Syndrome.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Sleep and human cognitive development.Sleep medicine reviews · 2021Review
- Characterization of Sleep Disturbances in Children and Adolescents with Down Syndrome and Their Relation with Cognitive and Behavioral Features.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Slow wave sleep in naps supports episodic memories in early childhood.Developmental science · 2021Article
- Role of Napping for Learning across the Lifespan.Current sleep medicine reports · 2020Article
- Habitual sleep is associated with both source memory and hippocampal subfield volume during early childhood.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- A preliminary examination of brain morphometry in youth with Down syndrome with and without parent-reported sleep difficulties.Research in developmental disabilities · 2020Article
- Sleep problems and recall memory in children with Down syndrome and typically developing controls.Research in developmental disabilities · 2020Article
- Influence of sleep and nap habituality on mnemonic discrimination in early childhood: An online study.Cognitive developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sleep is recognized as a physiological state associated with learning, with studies showing that knowledge acquisition improves with naps. Little work has examined sleep-dependent learning in people with developmental disorders, for whom sleep quality is often impaired. We examined the effect of natural, in-home naps on word learning in typical young children and children with Down syndrome (DS). Despite similar immediate memory retention, naps benefitted memory performance in typical children but hindered performance in children with DS, who retained less when tested after a nap, but were more accurate after a wake interval. These effects of napping persisted 24 h later in both groups, even after an intervening overnight period of sleep. During naps in typical children, memory retention for object-label associations correlated positively with percent of time in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. However, in children with DS, a population with reduced REM, learning was impaired, but only after the nap. This finding shows that a nap can increase memory loss in a subpopulation, highlighting that naps are not universally beneficial. Further, in healthy preschooler's naps, processes in REM sleep may benefit learning.
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