Poster #3 - Napping Helps Infants Consolidate Balance Control Training to Reduce Cognitive Load

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Sleep facilitates learning in infancy across a variety of contexts. For example, napping facilitates infants’ learning to solve a novel motor problem (Berger & Scher, 2017), vocabulary and rules for language (e.g. Friedrich et al., 2015, Gómez et al., 2006; Simon et al., 2017), and declarative and episodic memory (Friedrich et al., 2020; Seehagen et al., 2015). In addition, the quality of night sleep predicts infants’ readiness to learn the next day (Horger et al., 2021). Moreover, napping and night sleep make unique contributions to infants’ and preschoolers’ learning (Horger et al., 2023; Werchan et al., 2021). Despite evidence for the importance of sleep, researchers know little about the mechanisms that underlie how sleep facilitates learning and consolidates new information. The goal of this study was to examine the unique contributions of day and night sleep for pre-crawling infants whose sleep architecture and motor skill differ from those of infants studied to date. To acccomplish this, infants solved a reaching task after a nap that followed balance control training and again after night sleep.

Eight 6- to 8-month-old typically developing (TD) infants able to sit independently but not yet crawl have participated thus far. Infants sat on a pliant foam surface to challenge their ability to keep balance and wore a head-mounted eye-tracker to track their gaze (Positive Science, LLC) during a reaching task. In this task, an experimenter hid a toy for infants to reach at one location in a board 5 consecutive times followed by once at another location. The task was administered three times: twice on a day separated by a four-hour interval, during which infants napped, and the next morning. After the first task, infants received a 10-minute training that encouraged them to shift their weight just outside the range of reach (Harbourne, et al, 2018). Primary outcome measures were changes in the extent of perseveration as measured via looking and reaching behavior and in balance control strategies across the sessions.

Preliminary findings reveal that infants leaned on the non-reaching arm and adopted a high guard position to secure postural stability. Number of falls decreased after the first session. Perseverative behavior also decreased after the first session. Data collection is ongoing and will include a control group of infants who do not nap between training and test sessions to tease apart the impact of the nap versus the balance training, as well as the effect of task repetition. Additional analyses will include gaze-tracking to document infants’ focus of attention.

Improvements in inhibition after the first session may stem from consolidation of balance control strategies during the nap. Unlike previous work with older infants and toddlers, the additional night of sleep did not facilitate improvement in performance.

Mastering postural control imposes a cognitive load that can elicit trade-offs between attention and action (Berger et al., 2017; Berger et al., 2018). The improvement in cognitive performance as a result of motor training reflects a reallocation of attention from balance control to inhibition.

Authors

• Michele Gonçalves Maia, Graduate Center, City University of New York
  Presenting Author

• Karl L. Jancart, Duquesne University

• Melanie Tommer

• Lizbet Rodriguez

• Olivia Abdelshahid

• Regina T. Harbourne, Duquesne University

• Sarah E. Berger, City University of New York College of Staten Island