Babies are champion learners: Born with just a few basic reflexes, they quickly teach themselves to navigate their world by observing, remembering and making sense of their surroundings, the language spoken around them and the nature of such elusive notions as time, space and permanence.

Babies are also champion nappers, snoozing away the majority of each day in brief interludes of peaceful slumber.

It turns out those two facts about babies are probably related. When it comes to learning, those naps are at least as purposeful as they are peaceful.

A new study suggests that, for babies, napping plays a key role in the formation of declarative memories — the process of learning from firsthand experience what things are and do, how they work, and how they relate to one another and to the self.

While few of us have explicit memories of infancy, it is a period when the young human is committing to long-term storage a vast trove of facts that can later be retrieved at will. That “declarative memory” will become the basis for a lifetime of further learning.

Without timely naps, new research suggests, much of what babies learn about the world around them might be promptly forgotten. If frequent daily naps did not follow intensive learning sessions in the first years of life, our path to walking, talking and purposeful exploration would probably take longer. It might not happen at all.