Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep

摘要

Initially fragile memories can gain stability via consolidation, but the extent to which sleep contributes to this process is unresolved (1,2). Sleep between encoding and retrieval, relative to wakefulness, promotes memory storage in some circumstances, perhaps from internally generated memory reactivation (3,4). Moreover, reinstating a learning context (an odor) during slow-wave sleep enhances retrieval of spatial information learned in that context (5). It remains unclear whether exposure during sleep to cues associated with newly learned infonnation can selectively enhance the storage of individual memories.