Schedule of Events | Symposia

Reactivating spatial memories during sleep using multi-sensory cueing and an immersive virtual environment

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

Gautam Narayan^1,2 (narayag1@uci.edu), Amit Sofer³, Katharine C. Simon^2,4,5, Evelyn M. Le^1,2, Hansen Zhang^1,2, Matthew Cho^1,2, Anat Arzi³, Eitan Schechtman^1,2; ¹Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA, ²Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA, ³Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, ⁴Department of Pediatrics, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA, ⁵Pulmonology Department, Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), Orange, California, USA

Sleep plays an active role in the consolidation of memories. During sleep, the neural traces supporting newly formed declarative memories are spontaneously reactivated. Targeted memory reactivation (TMR) is a technique that uses non-invasive sensory cues, such as odors or sounds, to preferentially reactivate associated memories during sleep. One avenue of TMR research that has not yet been explored involves the combined use of odors and sounds to selectively enhance memories. Here, we examine the interactive effects of multi-modal reactivation cues during sleep on consolidation in a realistic first-person memory task. We used the Minecraft Memory and Navigation task, a first-person, engaging spatial task that demonstrates sleep’s contribution to spatial memory (Simon et al., 2022). Following memory encoding of unique locations and the environment which we enriched with odors and sounds, we reactivated the encoded memories during NREM sleep using the odors, sounds, or both. We hypothesized that rich, multisensory synergetic reactivation during sleep, compared to the unisensory reactivation, would maximally benefit spatial memory recall. Additionally, we explored the effect of different cueing regimes on sleep spindles and slow oscillations during NREM sleep. Our study reveals the contribution of memory consolidation during sleep to real-life spatial memories, and provides insight into whether multisensory cueing has synergistic, additive, or competitive benefits for consolidation.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic