WEDNESDAY 21 JANUARY 28, 2015 7 RABIE AL THANI 1436 Baby naps help etch memories Snoozing is an important function that strengthens infants’ ability to remember B ABIES 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 When it comes to learning, those naps are at least as purposeful as they are peaceful 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. Researchers from the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and the University of Sheffield in Britain explored the purpose and timing of babies’ naps with a series of experiments on 6- and 12-montholds. Their findings were reported online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because most babies at those ages are not yet talking, the researchers had to find a nonverbal way to measure how the timing of sleep influenced the strength of a memory. Four furry puppets -- two resembling mice and two resembling rabbits, each wearing a detachable felt mitten on one hand -- helped researchers infer whether or not a baby had successfully committed his or her experience with the puppets to memory and stored that information for later use. On a researcher’s first visit to a baby’s home, he or she sat across from baby and caregiver, showed the baby the puppet, and demonstrated how the mitten could be removed, how shaking the mitten would cause a little bell inside the mitten to tinkle, and how the mitten could be replaced on the puppet’s hand. Some of the 60 6-month-olds and the 60 12-month-olds were assigned to a “nap” condition: Researchers timed their arrival, and their puppet demonstrations, to come several hours after a baby had last napped. Since babies in their first year can rarely stay awake for much more than four hours between naps, the researchers could be confident (and parental logs recorded) that the baby would fall asleep soon after the puppet demonstration and nap for at least 30 minutes (and more likely for about 80 minutes). MCT News Service Italian designer Giambattista Valli (right) appears at the end of his Haute Couture Spring Summer 2015 fashion show in Paris. US actress Natalie Portman poses prior to attend the fashion show in Paris. Groovily Barbarella Fluorescent spring-summer collection reigns over catwalks of world’s fashion capital T HE stars were aligned at Dior’s Haute Couture fashion show in Paris. First, American actress Natalie Portman -- the advertising face of Dior’s “Miss Dior” perfume -- was sitting in the front row, somewhat less stiffly than her Queen Padme persona from the “Star Wars” prequels. Second was the spring-summer collection itself: all groovily “Barbarella” with fluorescent orange boots and skintight catsuits with flower-power patterns worn by models descending from a multi-level space-opera set purpose-built in the gardens of Paris’s Rodin Museum. Third was David Bowie’s early years London pop washing out of the sound system, including tunes performed by his stage alter ego Ziggy Stardust. It was very retro space age -- yet designer Raf Simons injected the show with a look at once and light. “I was always thinking of the future for so many years and I was always anti-romanticising the past, but the past can be beautiful too,” he said. The colourful garments, he said, incarnated “the romance of the 50s, with the experimentation of the 60s and the liberation of the 70s”. His ambition was for “something wilder, more strange and certainly more liberated for the haute couture and for women”. Bright, very bright colours, lines and swirls competed for attention on the outfits, which ranged from Dior’s trademark thin-waisted, flouncy dresses to second skins to mid-thigh tunics with latex leggings. All carried on exquisitely stilettoed shoes and eye-catching boots. It was as if Austin Powers were piloting the spaceship, headed for Woodstock with an ultra-glam female party crew on board. Indeed, Dior itself described the collection as a time-travelling “hallucinogenic amalgamation” in its production notes. The idea, it said, was to subvert the typical Dior “femme fleur” image it has built up over the years. Flower power, indeed: a nostalgic trip harking back to a breezier, maybe more innocent, time when fashion, leisure, music and the beginning of mass travel promised what seemed a bright future of free love and world peace. Current events in the news may give the lie to that promise, but maybe that’s why the privileged crowd watching the show applauded so heartily -- hailing this image of hope over reality. The VIP crowd putting its wellmanicured hands together included Chinese model-actress Angelababy, 1960s and 1970s American model Marisa Berenson, and Bernard Arnaud, the head of the LVMH luxury goods empire that controls Dior. Backstage, the couturieres who handmade the garments said about the challenge of working with material like PVC, which was made into see-through jackets for some of the numbers. “We had to learn to work with it -- we’d never done that before... find threads that can’t be seen, that don’t break,” said one, who gave her first name as Florence. Simons said he sought to invoke the way women in the 1960s and 1970s expressed political views through their bodies and what they wore. The bodysuit, for instance, was “not changing the body -- it is the body, so in that sense I think it’s interesting to communicate directly with purely the form of the body”. Challenging the often-grim news from around the world was a priority, he admitted. “This for me is also about love. The ‘60s and ‘70s were much about love, so it was a conscious decision to go there right now,” Simons said. Agence France-Presse Printed future Haute Couture week goes psychedelic with mixed styles in fabrics and designs, writes Astrid Wendlandt C A model presents a creation by Giambattista Valli during the fashion show in Paris. HRISTIAN Dior went psychedelic, kicking off the first full day of Haute Couture week in Paris with a collection mixing styles, prints and fabrics reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. Raf Simons, the French brand’s designer for nearly three years, said he was inspired by “the romance of a near past, when space-age and mindexpanding ideas of a future felt full of possibilities for society, pop culture and fashion”. Wearing ultra-mini skirts, transparent printed plastic capes and tattoo body suits, models strutted to David Bowie’s 1972 Ziggy Stardust album in a room decked with white scaffolding and mirrors. Striking silhouettes included a flashy silver-sequined, tight-fitting bodysuit worn with lilac-coloured, low-cut boots, and corolla-shaped romantic white dresses with flashy blue or yellow, knee-high, vinyl boots. Critics said this new Dior couture collection cemented the view that Simons was making his mark at the fashion house with his original shoe designs with a particular focus on heels. This collection included boots with an empty rectangle shape of a heel with glittering crystals on the bottom. Previously, stilettos featured a slightly curving heel and pumps had plastic soles like running shoes. Christian Dior is one of the biggest fashion brands owned by LVMH. Models present creations by Italian designer Giambattista Valli in the fashion show in Paris. Schiaparelli, the inter-war period fashion house being resuscitated by Italian luxury goods magnate Diego Della Valle, also offered a voyage through time. The show, orchestrated by artistic director Jean-Paul Goude, featured models walking down the runway to a modern version of Ravel’s Bolero, wearing cocktail dresses inspired by Schiaparelli’s 1935 “stop, look and listen” collection. The brand, known for zany pieces such as the lobster dress worn by the Duchess of Windsor, re-opened its atelier two years ago in the same building it used to occupy in Paris’ plush Place Vendome, more associated today with jewellery than with fashion. Schiaparelli’s pieces included a gold lame tuxedo jacket with a short skirt and a huge bow fitted at the back as well as a flowing, long black tulle dress with printed stars of all colours. “Many of these dresses made me smile,” said French comedian Valerie Lemercier, who was sitting close to singer Carla Bruni Sarkozy. “And it does not happen very often that fashion makes you smile.” The collection was the first put together by the brand’s internal team after the abrupt departure last year of designer Marco Zanini, who previously worked at Rochas, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana. Della Valle, Tod’s executive chairman, said he was in no hurry to find a replacement, saying he preferred to build a team of young talents, whom he expects eventually to be led by a creative director but not by a designer who would strongly imprint his personality. “I want to create a factory of style in Place Vendome,” Della Valle said. “The idea is to explore the archives and the Schiaparelli style but with a modern touch.” Reuters