Forgot the finer points of that video game junior taught you to play this afternoon? Try taking a nap.

A new study has found that sleep helps people learn complicated tasks, as well as recover information they thought they had forgotten.

Researchers from the University of Chicago trained about 200 college students, most of whom were female, to play complex video games that required responses to a continually changing visual and auditory environment.

They found that subjects who were trained to play the games in the morning, closest to their wake-up time, had an 8 percentage point improvement in accuracy immediately after training, but lost half of those points when re-tested in the evening.

However, when re-tested the next morning, the subjects' improvement was back up by 10 percentage points.

The students tested more poorly in the afternoon because their waking experiences may have interfered with what they had learned, the researchers said.

"Sleep consolidated learning by restoring what was lost over the course of a day following training and by protecting what was learned against subsequent loss," researcher Howard Nusbaum, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. "These findings suggest that sleep has an important role in learning generalized skills in stabilizing and protecting memory."

The findings are published in the journal Learning and Memory.

The results suggest that sleep may help those who are learning language processes, such as reading and writing, as well as hand-eye skills required for sports, the researchers said.

The research also reaffirms the results of a previous study conducted by the researchers that showed that a night's sleep helped subjects retain information while they were learning a language.