Biasing the content of hippocampal replay during sleep

By Daniel Bendor, Matthew A. Wilson. 2012

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The hippocampus is essential for 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 be observed. To test this, we trained rats on an auditory-spatial association task while recording from neuronal ensembles in the hippocampus. We found that, during sleep, a task-related auditory cue biased reactivation events toward 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.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Hippocampal place cells construct reward related sequences through unexplored space (2015, methodology): “Finally, to corroborate the results obtained from the rank-order analysis of spike sequences, we applied a Bayesian spatial reconstruction algorithm (Davidson et al., 2009; Bendor and Wilson, 2012) to the data from the two rest sessions.”
About sleep's role in memory. (2013, background): “Most recently, Bender and Wilson (75) specifically examined whether cueing during non-REM sleep is capable of reactivating hippocampal place cell activity implicated in prior learning.”
The content of hippocampal “replay” (2018, background): “While current evidence indicates that ripples can be influenced by external inputs (Bendor & Wilson, 2012; McNamara et al., 2014), these population-level events are largely dependent upon the internal circuitry of the hippocampus (Buzs aki, 2015; Buzs aki et al., 1987).”
Spatial representations of granule cells and mossy cells of the dentate gyrus (2017, background): “The increased activity of granule cells during sleep may serve a crucial role in coordinating the hippocampal-neocortical dialog that occurs during hypothesized periods of memory consolidation (Siapas and Wilson, 1998; Isomura et al., 2006; Bendor and Wilson, 2012).”
Strengthening Procedural Memories by Reactivation in Sleep (2014, background): “It has recently been demonstrated in rats that presenting acoustic cues for a spatial learning task during sleep biases the content of replay, but not the number of reactivations (Bendor & Wilson, 2012).”
The Role of Hippocampal Replay in Memory and Planning (2018, methodology): “Commonly, the observed spike sequence is divided into short time windows ( 10 ms); Bayes formula with a uniform prior is then used to calculate the probability of the animal being at each position on the track given the observed spikes [33,57,64,66,95,142,157].”
Neural ensemble reactivation in rapid eye movement and slow-wave sleep coordinate with muscle activity to promote rapid motor skill learning (2020, background): “The association of neutral sensory stimuli such as tones during learning can improve memory if the stimuli are played during sleep [13], a process that appears to work by biasing replay content during sleep [14].”
Sleep for cognitive enhancement (2014, background): “…have not been studied directly, indirect evidence suggests that there might be a limited capacity for memory replay during sleep such that increasing reactivation of one memory decreases reactivation of other memories (Antony et al., 2012; Bendor and Wilson, 2012; Kelemen and Born, 2012).”
Slow-Wave Sleep-Imposed Replay Modulates Both Strength and Precision of Memory (2014, background): “Furthermore, although sensory input is reduced during SWS, exposure during SWS to contextual cues associated with the learning event can enhance memory consolidation, perhaps by enhancing the effectiveness of replay (Rasch et al., 2007; Bendor and Wilson, 2012).”