Slaap is belangrijk bij kinderen, nouja slaap is belangrijk voor iedereen. Maar nieuw onderzoek toont dat slaap een cruciale rol speelt bij kinderen om dingen die ze leerden om te laten zetten naar actieve kennis. Vanuit eerder onderzoek bij volwassenen weten we al dat slapen na leren er voor kan zorgen dat dingen beter onthouden kunnen worden. Dit zou nog effectiever gebeuren bij kinderen.

Onderzoekster Ines Wilhelm stelt hierover: “In children, much more efficient explicit knowledge is generated during sleep from a previously learned implicit task. And the children’s extraordinary ability is linked with the large amount of deep sleep they get at night. The formation of explicit knowledge appears to be a very specific ability of childhood sleep, since children typically benefit as much or less than adults from sleep when it comes to other types of memory tasks.”

Abstract van het onderzoek:

When sleep followed implicit training on a motor sequence, children showed greater gains in explicit sequence knowledge after sleep than adults. This greater explicit knowledge in children was linked to their higher sleep slow-wave activity and to stronger hippocampal activation at explicit knowledge retrieval. Our data indicate the superiority of children in extracting invariant features from complex environments, possibly as a result of enhanced reprocessing of hippocampal memory representations during slow-wave sleep.