Does sleep help children to generalise features like adults?

TL;DR

The study explores how sleep affects children's and adults' ability to generalize information from social and non-social contexts.

Contribution

It reveals that adults better generalize social features during sleep, while children show no such difference.

Findings

Adults outperformed children in associating offers with unknown faces during sleep in a social context.

Children and adults showed no difference in generalizing non-social features during sleep or wakefulness.

Children recognized faces better, but adults generalized social features more effectively after sleep.

Abstract

Children and adults have been shown to benefit from sleep with regard to the consolidation of declarative memories. Especially during childhood, the generalisation of information from social and non‐social contexts is important for adaptable behaviour in new situations and might show specific features in children. Here, we investigated whether adults (n = 18) and children (n = 19) differ in their generalisation of features assessed in wake and sleep conditions. In a social paradigm, certain face features were associated with different types of offers (fair, unfair, friendly). While children tended to better recognise these faces, adults were better than children at associating the type of offer to unknown faces sharing these features with the previously encoded faces in the sleep condition. To assess generalisation of features in a non‐social context, a probabilistic evaluative conditioning paradigm was used, where stimuli were associated with positive or negative values. We found no difference between children and adults or between the sleep and wake condition in the change in evaluation of the conditioned stimuli when paired congruently with a predefined value (positive/negative). Together, our results suggest a differential feature generalisation from mainly social contexts in children compared with adults.

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