Are you worried that a little daytime napping might spoil a good night's sleep?

Do not worry, A new study has revealed that a nap has little effect on sleep onset and it is actually beneficial for memory.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers in the United States, they found that a brief daytime nap of 45 minutes boosts a person's declarative memory performance.

Lead researcher Matthew A. Tucker of Harvard Medical School says, this means that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well.

33 people - 11 males and 22 females with an average age of 23.3 years were subjected to an experiment. The participants arrived at the sleep lab at 11.30 am, they were trained on each of the declarative memory tasks at 12.15 pm and at 1 pm 16 of them took a nap while 17 remained awake. After the nap period, all subjects remained in the lab until the re-test at 4 pm.

The researchers found that across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for those that strongly acquired the tasks during the training session. Moreover, according to them, the daytime nap is unlikely to disturb the participants' seven to eight hours of nightly sleep. "These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory," Tucker said to the ScienceDaily