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Consolidation refers to the process by which memories are stabilized after their initial acquisition. This occurs over the short-term of hours–days by cellular changes in synaptic plasticity (synaptic consolidation) and over the long-term of weeks–years by circuit changes involving the recruitment of brain regions different from those where the memories were initially encoded (systems consolidation).
Seven to 12 year-old children showed greater performance gains on a motor sequence task across post-learning resting periods than adolescents, young adults and older adults, suggesting a developmental advantage in offline motor memory consolidation.
Dopamine may help strengthen fear-inhibitory extinction memories through influences on the prefrontal cortex. Here, the authors replicate their previous finding that prefrontal reactivations are predictive of extinction memory retrieval but do not replicate the enhancing effects of L-DOPA.
Early life experience contributes to behaviour in later life. Here the authors show in rats, that the infant brain, during a critical period, forms lasting memories of the spatial context of experiences; in adulthood, these memories involving medial prefrontal cortex improve spatial abilities in similar contexts.
Sleep helps to stabilize long-term memories, possibly through the temporal synchronization of neuronal activity in different brain regions. Intracranial stimulation during sleep using prefrontal electric pulses, precisely timed with slow-wave activities in the medial temporal lobe, enhanced the coupling of neuronal oscillations across regions of the human brain and improved memory performance.
A new study shows that infra-slow cortical norepinephrine oscillations shape the micro-structure of sleep and transitions to micro-arousals, wakefulness or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Prolonged descending phases of these oscillations promote the occurrence of spindle-rich intermediate sleep, which is involved in memory consolidation.
In the hippocampus of adult mice, neuronally expressed interleukin-33 acts as a signal for microglial cell-mediated extracellular matrix remodelling, regulating synaptic plasticity and promoting memory consolidation.
