The fate of memories in our brain depends on processes that take place after memory acquisition and depend on spontaneous activity. Much of this activity takes place during sleep and involves the interaction between the hippocampus and the neocortex.
According to the “dual memory systems” hypothesis, new memories are initially encoded in the hippocampus and stored in the neocortex once consolidated. Maintaining remote (old) memories while permitting the consolidation of novel (new) memories during sleep, would require the interleaved, spontaneous reactivation of these memories.
In this project, we aim to test this hypothesis via Closed-Loop manipulation applied during Slow-Wave-Sleep, on mice that have previously learned a memory task in Virtual-Reality.