Sleep Reinforces Learning — Especially for Children

During sleep, our brains store what we have learned during the day ‒ a process even more effective in children than in adults It is important for children to get enough sleep.

Children’s brains transform subconsciously learned material into active knowledge while they sleep – even more effectively than adult brains do.

Children sleep longer and deeper, and they must take on enormous amounts of information every day.

In the current study, the researchers examined the ability to form explicit knowledge via an implicitly-learned motor task. Children between 8 and 11, and young adults, learned to guess the predetermined series of actions – without being aware of the existence of the series itself.

Following a night of sleep or a day awake, the subjects’ memories were tested. The result: after a night’s sleep, both age groups could remember a larger number of elements from the row of numbers than those who had remained awake in the interim.

And the children were much better at it than the adults.

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