Losing memories during sleep after targeted memory reactivation.
Neurobiol Learn Mem
; 151: 10-17, 2018 05.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-29555349
ABSTRACT
Targeting memories during sleep opens powerful and innovative ways to influence the mind. We used targeted memory reactivation (TMR), which to date has been shown to strengthen learned episodes, to instead induce forgetting (TMR-Forget). Participants were first trained to associate the act of forgetting with an auditory forget tone. In a second, separate, task they learned object-sound-location pairings. Shortly thereafter, some of the object sounds were played during slow wave sleep, paired with the forget tone to induce forgetting. One week later, participants demonstrated lower recall of reactivated versus non-reactivated objects and impaired recognition memory and lowered confidence for the spatial location of the reactivated objects they failed to spontaneously recall. The ability to target specific episodic memories for forgetting during sleep has implications for developing novel therapeutic techniques for psychological disorders such as PTSD and phobias.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Auditory Perception
/
Sleep
/
Memory
Limits:
Adolescent
/
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Language:
En
Journal:
Neurobiol Learn Mem
Journal subject:
BIOLOGIA
/
CIENCIAS DO COMPORTAMENTO
/
NEUROLOGIA
Year:
2018
Document type:
Article