Electrophysiological markers of memory consolidation in the human brain when memories are reactivated during sleep.

Human accomplishments depend on learning, and effective learning depends on consolidation. Consolidation is the process whereby new memories are gradually stored in an enduring way in the brain so that they can be available when needed. For factual or event knowledge, consolidation is thought to progress during sleep as well as during waking states and to be mediated by interactions between hippocampal and neocortical networks.

Memory and Sleep: How Sleep Cognition Can Change the Waking Mind for the Better.

The memories that we retain can serve many functions. They guide our future actions, form a scaffold for constructing the self, and continue to shape both the self and the way we perceive the world. Although most memories we acquire each day are forgotten, those integrated within the structure of multiple prior memories tend to endure.

Grappling With Implicit Social Bias: A Perspective From Memory Research.

There is now widespread consensus that social biases often influence actions independently of the actor's intention or awareness. The notion that we are sometimes blind to the origins of our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors also features prominently in research into domain-general human memory systems, which has a long history of distinguishing between implicit and explicit repercussions of past experience. A shared challenge across these fields of study is thus to identify techniques for effectively managing the contents of our memory stores, particularly those aspects into which we have limited metacognitive insight.

Phase of Spontaneous Slow Oscillations during Sleep Influences Memory-Related Processing of Auditory Cues.

Unlabelled: Slow oscillations during slow-wave sleep (SWS) may facilitate memory consolidation by regulating interactions between hippocampal and cortical networks. Slow oscillations appear as high-amplitude, synchronized EEG activity, corresponding to upstates of neuronal depolarization and downstates of hyperpolarization. Memory reactivations occur spontaneously during SWS, and can also be induced by presenting learning-related cues associated with a prior learning episode during sleep.

Cognitive neuroscience. Unlearning implicit social biases during sleep.

Although people may endorse egalitarianism and tolerance, social biases can remain operative and drive harmful actions in an unconscious manner. Here, we investigated training to reduce implicit racial and gender bias. Forty participants processed counterstereotype information paired with one sound for each type of bias.

Targeted Memory Reactivation during Sleep Depends on Prior Learning.

Study Objectives: When sounds associated with learning are presented again during slow-wave sleep, targeted memory reactivation (TMR) can produce improvements in subsequent location recall. Here we used TMR to investigate memory consolidation during an afternoon nap as a function of prior learning.

Participants: Twenty healthy individuals (8 male, 19-23 y old).

Benefits of mindfulness training for patients with progressive cognitive decline and their caregivers.

New strategies are needed to help people cope with the repercussions of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. Patients and caregivers face different challenges, but here we investigated an intervention tailored for this combined population. The program focused on training skills such as attending to the present moment nonjudgmentally, which may help reduce maladaptive emotional responses.

Distinct medial temporal contributions to different forms of recognition in amnestic mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease.

The simplest expression of episodic memory is the experience of familiarity, the isolated recognition that something has been encountered previously. Brain structures of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) make essential contributions to episodic memory, but the distinct contributions from each MTL structure to familiarity are debatable. Here we used specialized tests to assess recognition impairments and their relationship to MTL integrity in people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI, n=19), people with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD; n=10), and age-matched individuals without any neurological disorder (n=20).

The role of memory reactivation during wakefulness and sleep in determining which memories endure.

Consolidation makes it possible for memories of our daily experiences to be stored in an enduring way. We propose that memory consolidation depends on the covert reactivation of previously learned material both during sleep and wakefulness. Here we tested whether the operation of covert memory reactivation influences the fundamental selectivity of memory storage--of all the events we experience each day, which will be retained and which forgotten? We systematically manipulated the value of information learned by 60 young subjects; they learned 72 object-location associations while hearing characteristic object sounds, and a number on each object indicated the reward value that could potentially be earned during a future memory test.