Naps improve new walkers' locomotor problem solving. 2017

Sarah E Berger, and Anat Scher
Department of Psychology, College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA. Electronic address: sarah.berger@csi.cuny.edu.

In this first study of the impact of sleep on infants' problem solving of a locomotor task, 28 newly walking infants who were within a week of having given up crawling trained to navigate a shoulder-height tunnel to reach a caregiver waiting at the end. During the transitional window between crawling and walking, infants are reluctant to return to crawling, making this task uniquely challenging. Infants were randomly assigned to either nap or stay awake during a delay between training and a later test session. For the Nap group, efficiency of problem solving improved from training to test, but there was no change for the No Nap group. These findings suggest that for newly walking infants, sleep facilitates learning to solve a novel motor problem.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D007223 Infant A child between 1 and 23 months of age. Infants
D007858 Learning Relatively permanent change in behavior that is the result of past experience or practice. The concept includes the acquisition of knowledge. Phenomenography
D008297 Male Males
D011340 Problem Solving A learning situation involving more than one alternative from which a selection is made in order to attain a specific goal.
D004644 Emotions Those affective states which can be experienced and have arousing and motivational properties. Feelings,Regret,Emotion,Feeling,Regrets
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D012890 Sleep A readily reversible suspension of sensorimotor interaction with the environment, usually associated with recumbency and immobility. Sleep Habits,Sleeping Habit,Sleeping Habits,Habit, Sleep,Habit, Sleeping,Habits, Sleep,Habits, Sleeping,Sleep Habit
D016138 Walking An activity in which the body advances at a slow to moderate pace by moving the feet in a coordinated fashion. This includes recreational walking, walking for fitness, and competitive race-walking. Ambulation

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