Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California 92697, USA.
Learn Mem. 2023 Jan 31;30(2):36-42. doi: 10.1101/lm.053634.122. Print 2023 Feb.
During sleep, recently acquired episodic memories (i.e., autobiographical memories for specific events) are strengthened and transformed, a process termed consolidation. These memories are contextual in nature, with details of specific features interwoven with more general properties such as the time and place of the event. In this study, we hypothesized that the context in which a memory is embedded would guide the process of consolidation during sleep. To test this idea, we used a spatial memory task and considered changes in memory over a 10-h period including either sleep or wake. In both conditions, participants ( = 62) formed stories that contextually bound four objects together and then encoded the on-screen spatial position of all objects. Results showed that the changes in memory over the sleep period were correlated among contextually linked objects, whereas no such effect was identified for the wake group. These results demonstrate that context-binding plays an important role in memory consolidation during sleep.
在睡眠过程中，新近获得的情景记忆（即对特定事件的自传体记忆）会得到加强和转化，这个过程被称为巩固。这些记忆具有情景性质，具体特征的细节与更一般的属性（如事件发生的时间和地点）交织在一起。在这项研究中，我们假设记忆所处的情境会引导睡眠期间的巩固过程。为了验证这一观点，我们使用了空间记忆任务，并考虑了在包括睡眠或清醒在内的 10 小时期间记忆的变化。在两种情况下，参与者（=62）都编写了将四个物体联系在一起的故事，然后对所有物体在屏幕上的空间位置进行编码。结果表明，在睡眠期间，语境相关的物体之间的记忆变化存在相关性，而清醒组则没有这种效应。这些结果表明，语境绑定在睡眠期间的记忆巩固中起着重要作用。
