Schedule of Events | Symposia

The effects of targeted memory reactivation of rescripted content during sleep on subsequent intrusive memories

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Neda R. Morakabati¹ (nmorakab@uci.edu), Maya Pourreza¹, Ria Karve¹, Eitan Schechtman¹; ¹Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Irvine

Individuals living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often experience intrusions, which are unwanted trauma-related memories that come to mind inadvertently. They are often distressing and can prevent those with PTSD from living full lives. Imagery Rescripting Therapy (IRT) is an effective therapy used to re-script the traumatic narrative into a more positive, resolved outcome, resulting in decreased symptoms. Our aim is to leverage sleep’s established benefit for memory consolidation along with IRT to reduce intrusions in an analogue trauma design. Targeted memory reactivation (TMR), a technique to unobtrusively reactivate specific memories during sleep, has recently been used to relieve patients suffering from Nightmare Disorder of their distressing nightmares by preferentially reactivating alternative positive dreams. In our study, participants watched a distressing film then engaged in an adapted version of IRT to rescript the film’s content. They then took a nap in one of three conditions: TMR targeting the rescripted ending, TMR using an unrelated sound, and no-TMR. We compared the number and distressfulness of intrusions between groups and hypothesize that consolidating the resolved version of distressing content through TMR will reduce the number of intrusions and distress it causes in the week following exposure. The results inform us on TMR’s potential benefits for clinical populations living with PTSD and further our understanding on how traumatic memories are consolidated.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic