NIGHTY NIGHT: Goffredina Spanò from Jamie Edgin’s University of Arizona lab uses polysomnography to measure sleep in a toddler with Down syndrome.PAMELA SPEDER
By the early 2000s, scientists had found that sleep helps young adults consolidate memory by reinforcing and filing away daytime experiences. But the older adults that Rebecca Spencer was studying at the University of Massachusetts Amherst didn’t seem to experience the same benefit. Spencer wondered if developmental stage altered the relationship between sleep and memory, and chose nearby preschool children as subjects. She found that habitual nappers benefitted the most from daytime rest, largely because their memories decayed the most without a nap. “By staying awake, they have more interference from daytime experiences,” Spencer explains.
Until recently, most of the research into the relationship between memory and sleep has been conducted using young adults or animal models. These studies have suggested that dampened sensory inputs ...
