Awake Reactivation of Prior Experiences Consolidates Memories and Biases Cognition

Published on August 23, 2019

After experiences are encoded into memory, post-encoding reactivation mechanisms have been proposed to mediate long-term memory stabilization and transformation. Spontaneous reactivation of hippocampal representations, together with hippocampal–cortical interactions, are leading candidate mechanisms for promoting systems-level memory strengthening and reorganization. While the replay of spatial representations has been extensively studied in rodents, here we review recent fMRI work that provides evidence for spontaneous reactivation of nonspatial, episodic event representations in the human hippocampus and cortex, as well as for experience-dependent alterations in systems-level hippocampal connectivity.

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