Importance of sleep for early learning highlighted

Sleep plays a vital role in the early learning and development of babies and young children, a study has found.

Infants who nap are better able to apply lessons learned to new skills, while sleeping appears to help toddlers retain learned knowledge.

The US researchers looked at the ability of young children to recognise something similar but not identical to what they have learned and apply it to a new situation. Known as “generalisation,” examples include recognising the letter ‘A’ in different fonts, or understanding a word regardless of who speaks it.