Children Strengthen Memory During Deep Sleep

Researchers from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, found two regions of the brain that are active in children as young as two years old. This area of ​​the brain reactivates during sleep to remember what was learned.
“We can now use sleep to look at the basic mechanisms of learning new words,” said Simona Ghetti, professor at the Center for Mind and Brain, University of California-Davis, in a paper published in Current Biology.
In his paper, Ghetti said that at the age of two to three years, children enter a unique age in memory development. But the brains of young children are difficult for researchers to study because children don’t like being in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.
“The things that scare young children the most are darkness and loud noises, and that’s what happens during an MRI scan,” Ghetti said.
He said the team’s scans carried out while the child was asleep on the MRI machine were unable to function. But the team found brain activity that occurs to retain memories of words received from previously played songs.
Graduate students Elliott Johnson and Ghetti created a series of made-up, but realistic-sounding words on a series of objects and puppets. In the first session, two year olds were introduced to two objects and two dolls, then they were tested by asking the names (objects and dolls) after a few minutes.
A week later, they returned and were tested to see if they could remember the names of the objects and dolls. Immediately after the second test, they slept through the night and were scanned with an MRI. The researchers played back words the children had learned, as well as other words, while they were sleeping.
The researchers found that activation of the hippocampus and temporal lobe occurred when sleeping children played with words they had previously learned. This activation correlated with how well they performed learning words the week before.
The hippocampus, an important part of the brain for forming, organizing, and storing new memories. While the temporal lobe is responsible for the function of hearing, memory, and emotion, it is located parallel to the ear.
“This suggests that the hippocampus is very important for laying down early memories for words,” says Ghetti. “This compares favorably with findings from children and older adults, where the hippocampus is associated with learning and with recalling recent memories,” Johnson said.

Experience
Overlap
Although young children quickly form memories of new words, they also lose a lot of memory, especially when forming memories in the context of where, when, let alone what happened. But if you learn the name of an object you don’t need to remember, the context is easier.
It is not clear how the children remember some things, such as names, while losing the rest. Ghetti suspects that overlapping learning experiences interfere with one another and cancel out unneeded details.
By conducting further research in the future, they believe they can find breakthroughs in children’s memory processing and can explain why overlapping learning experiences can affect memory in children. hi/N-3