Biasing the content of hippocampal replay during sleep

• Main Authors: Bender, Daniel A. (Contributor), Wilson, Matthew A. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor), Picower Institute for Learning and Memory (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group, 2016-05-25T13:24:36Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

The hippocampus plays an essential role in encoding self-experienced events into memory. During sleep, neural activity in the hippocampus related to a recent experience has been observed to spontaneously reoccur, and this "replay" has been postulated to be important for memory consolidation. Task-related cues can enhance memory consolidation when presented during a post-training sleep session, and if memories are consolidated by hippocampal replay, a specific enhancement for this replay should also be observed. To test this, we have trained rats on an auditory-spatial association task, while recording from neuronal ensembles in the hippocampus. Here we report that during sleep, a task-related auditory cue biases reactivation events towards replaying the spatial memory associated with that cue. These results indicate that sleep replay can be manipulated by external stimulation, and provide further evidence for the role of hippocampal replay in memory consolidation.
Merck Award/Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship
Charles King Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship
National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH 1-K99-DC012321-01)
National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH 5R01MH061976)