TY - JOUR
T1 - Losing memories during sleep after targeted memory reactivation
AU - Simon, Katharine C.N.S.
AU - Gómez, Rebecca L.
AU - Nadel, Lynn
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Episodic memory
KW - Forgetting
KW - Sleep
KW - Targeted memory reactivation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85044745152&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1016/j.nlm.2018.03.003
DO - 10.1016/j.nlm.2018.03.003
M3 - Article
C2 - 29555349
AN - SCOPUS:85044745152
VL - 151
SP - 10
EP - 17
JO - Communications in behavioral biology. Part A: [Original articles]
JF - Communications in behavioral biology. Part A: [Original articles]
SN - 1074-7427
ER -