Schedule of Events | Symposia

Targeted memory reactivation during wakefulness improves spatial recall under challenging retrieval conditions

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

Gayathri Subramanian¹ (gayathrisubramanian2024@u.northwestern.edu), Ken Paller¹; ¹Northwestern University

Recently acquired memories can be reactivated and altered using Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR) during sleep. TMR studies have thus revealed new information about consolidation. The present research sought to contrast TMR during sleep and wake. Participants learned 60 object locations while listening to object names (e.g.,”cat”). After learning the locations, participants were given a location recall test. Wake TMR was accomplished by presenting half of the object names with instructions to mentally recall the corresponding locations. Comparing recall accuracy from before to after TMR revealed no significant difference. Whereas this experiment occurred within a single session, a second experiment was run in three sessions over two days. In the TMR session, which was run 60 minutes after learning, 10 participants were asked to covertly recall locations (as in the prior experiment) and 10 to overtly place objects in their locations. The next day, all participants learned new locations for the same set of objects. Next, they were tested on the original locations. The challenge of recalling locations following a 1-day delay with interference learning was predicted to increase the likelihood of memory improvement from reactivation. Indeed, we observed a strong TMR benefit on recall accuracy. Furthermore, there was a nonsignificant trend for a larger benefit with overt compared to covert reactivation. These results help to define the boundary conditions for observing wake TMR benefits. We conclude that TMR during wakefulness may alter memory storage by counteracting forgetting in ways that are more likely to be apparent under challenging retrieval conditions.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic