Your mother may have been right: Standing up straight and having good posture doesn’t only make you taller and look more confident, but it has specific health benefits. One recent study found that babies’ learning ability might be affected by their postures; having a straight spine actually improved their ability to map new experiences and remember things.

The study, out of Indiana University, was conducted by Linda Smith, a professor at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, in collaboration with a roboticist and a developmental psychologist. They focused on studying how “objects of cognition,” like words or memories, are linked to the body’s posture or position.

Interestingly, this was a study that examined both infants and robots — known specifically as epigenetic robots, these machines are meant to develop like children, through interaction with the environment. The researchers created a learning robot that was able to learn through its physicality and spatial relationships to objects. They found that both in robots and infants, the body's posture in relation to an object as its name was spoken aloud played a significant role in them remembering it.

“This study shows that the body plays a role in early object name learning, and how toddlers use the body’s position in space to connect ideas,” Smith said in the press release. “The creation of a robot model for infant learning has far-reaching implications for how the brains of young people work.”

She continued: "These experiments may provide a new way to investigate the way cognition is connected to the body, as well as new evidence that mental entities, such as thoughts, words and representations of objects, which seem to have no spatial or bodily components, first take shape through spatial relationship of the body within the surrounding world."

Past research has shown that good posture goes beyond just learning improvement for infants. In fact, studies have shown that good posture improves your mood by making you feel more energetic and upbeat. It also increases your sense of power and confidence, and generates more positive thinking. Standing up straight, as opposed to slouching behind your computer, boosts air flow to the lungs; as a result, your brain gets more oxygen as needed for problem-solving and creative thinking.