McKenna: Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory (Notre Dame)

James McKenna founded and ran the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, where he and colleagues spent over three decades documenting the physiology of mother-infant cosleeping. The research used laboratory polysomnography to measure what actually happens during the night when mothers and infants share a bed. The findings have been consistent across studies. Cosleeping mother-infant pairs synchronize sleep stages.

Babies move through more transitions between sleep states, which appears to be protective against the kind of deep sleep that is associated with SIDS in infants who do not yet have full breathing control. Breastfeeding mothers and their infants show even tighter synchrony, and bed-sharing breastfeeding dyads breastfeed twice as often per night as non-bed-sharing pairs, with most of the feeds going unremembered by the mother in the morning. McKenna is the most cited researcher in the cosleeping literature.