Understanding the strengthening and transformation of memory during sleep

Abstract

Sleep has been repeatedly shown to strengthen and transform memories. It is thought that this occurs through the repeated reactivation of memory traces that were encoded during prior wakefulness. This replay process enables the consolidation of traces that are representing the memory in transient stores such as the hippocampus, but also the transfer to long-term stores putatively located in the neocortex – so called systems consolidation. I will present work using graph network based learning tasks to show that this process may preferably act on information that has high relevance within such networks, i.e., nodes with high local and/or global centrality. Additionally, I will show a line of work using the false memory paradigm to investigate the transformation of memories. Here, I will discuss the use of word embeddings to understand how humans abstract gist from associated information.