Replay memory & sleep

Our research is exploring in rats and humans the importance of sleep for memory and navigation. We have shown that during quiet restful sleep epochs the hippocampal place cell activity appears to depict paths through unexplored space specifically if it will lead to a future reward (Olafsdottir et al. 2015 eLife). We have also shown that sleep impacts on our memory for high-rewarded objects in an environment (Javadi et al. 2015 Learning and memory). In recent work we have begun to explore how sleep deprivation may disrupt the typical consolidation of memories and neural dynamics for recently acquired knowledge.