Publications by authors named "Angelina Allia"
The unique contributions of day and night sleep to infant motor problem solving.
J Exp Child Psychol
February 2023
The current study sought to tease apart the unique contributions of napping and nighttime sleep to infant learning, specifically in the context of motor problem solving. We challenged 54 walking infants to solve a novel locomotor problem at three time points-training, test, and follow-up the next morning. One group of infants napped during the delay between training and test.
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- Twenty-nine infants learned to navigate a nylon tunnel to reach a caregiver, with one group napping shortly after training and the other napping four hours later.
- Nap First infants showed better learning outcomes: they needed fewer prompts, made fewer posture shifts, and solved the task faster than Delay First infants.
- The study emphasizes that timely naps enhance memory consolidation in infants, illustrating the critical link between sleep and learning.
Incorporating infant sleep, either as a predictor or as an outcome variable, into interdisciplinary work has become increasingly popular. Sleep researchers face many methodological choices that have implications for the reliability and validity of the data. Here, the authors directly investigated the impact of design and measurement choices in a small, longitudinal sample of infants.
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- Sleep plays a crucial role in preparing both children and adults for cognitive tasks, with insufficient sleep adversely affecting cognitive functions.
- A study monitored newly-walking infants' sleep and later assessed their ability to solve a motor problem, categorizing them into groups based on their performance.
- Interestingly, the results suggested that a certain level of sleep fragmentation may actually benefit learning in infants, as those who experienced the least sleep disruption had trouble solving the task efficiently.