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Science 6 April 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5821, pp. 76 - 82
DOI: 10.1126/science.1135935
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Research Articles

Schemas and Memory Consolidation

Dorothy Tse,1* Rosamund F. Langston,1* Masaki Kakeyama,2 Ingrid Bethus,1 Patrick A. Spooner,1 Emma R. Wood,1 Menno P. Witter,3 Richard G. M. Morris1{dagger}

Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memory in the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process. We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occur extremely quickly if an associative "schema" into which new information is incorporated has previously been created. In experiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task for rats, the memory of flavor-place associations became persistent over time as a putative neocortical schema gradually developed. New traces, trained for only one trial, then became assimilated and rapidly hippocampal-independent. Schemas also played a causal role in the creation of lasting associative memory representations during one-trial learning. The concept of neocortical schemas may unite psychological accounts of knowledge structures with neurobiological theories of systems memory consolidation.

1 Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, and Centre for Neuroscience Research, University of Edinburgh, 1 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, Scotland, UK.
2 Division of Environmental Health Sciences, Center for Disease Biology and Integrative Medicine, Graduate School and Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Faculty of Medicine Building 1, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
3 Centre for the Biology of Memory, Medical-Technical Research Centre, NO-7489 Trondheim, Norway.

* These authors contributed equally to this work.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: r.g.m.morris{at}ed.ac.uk

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)