Human hippocampal replay during rest prioritizes weakly learned information and predicts memory performance

By Anna C. Schapiro, Elizabeth A. McDevitt, Timothy T. Rogers, Sara C. Mednick, Kenneth A. Norman. 2017

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The hippocampus replays experiences during quiet rest periods, and this replay benefits subsequent memory. A critical open question is how memories are prioritized for this replay. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) pattern analysis to track item-level replay in the hippocampus during an awake rest period after participants studied 15 objects and completed a memory test. Objects that were remembered less well were replayed more during the subsequent rest period, suggesting a prioritization process in which weaker memories—memories most vulnerable to forgetting—are selected for replay. In a second session 12 hours later, more replay of an object during a rest period predicted better subsequent memory for that object. Replay predicted memory improvement across sessions only for participants who slept during that interval. Our results provide evidence that replay in the human hippocampus prioritizes weakly learned information, predicts subsequent memory performance, and relates to memory improvement across a delay with sleep. The hippocampus is known to 'replay' experiences and memories during rest periods, but it is unclear how particular memories are prioritized for replay. Here, the authors show that information that is remembered less well is replayed more often, suggesting that weaker memories are selected for replay.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Learning Structures: Predictive Representations, Replay, and Generalization (2020, background): “Human and animal neural evidence supports a role for wake and sleep memory replay in generalization and community detection [59,60], inference [52,61] especially of unseen relations among states, problem solving, and memory consolidation [62,63].”
How can memories last for days, years, or a lifetime? Proposed mechanisms for maintaining synaptic potentiation and memory (2019, background): “It was determined (Schapiro et al. 2018) that increased hippocampal replay of engrams encoding specific learned items correlated with improved memory of those items 12 h after learning.”
Integration of New Information in Memory: New Insights from a Complementary Learning Systems Perspective (2020, background): “replay [36, 17].”