Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.
Dorothy Tse,1*Rosamund F. Langston,1*Masaki Kakeyama,2Ingrid Bethus,1Patrick A. Spooner,1Emma R. Wood,1Menno P. Witter,3Richard G. M. Morris1
Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memoryin the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process.We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occurextremely quickly if an associative "schema" into which newinformation is incorporated has previously been created. Inexperiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate taskfor rats, the memory of flavor-place associations became persistentover time as a putative neocortical schema gradually developed.New traces, trained for only one trial, then became assimilatedand rapidly hippocampal-independent. Schemas also played a causalrole in the creation of lasting associative memory representationsduring one-trial learning. The concept of neocortical schemasmay unite psychological accounts of knowledge structures withneurobiological 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.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: r.g.m.morris{at}ed.ac.uk
The dynamics of memory: Context-dependent updating.
A. Hupbach, O. Hardt, R. Gomez, and L. Nadel (2008)
Learn. Mem.
15, 574-579
|Abstract »|Full Text »|PDF »
Retrograde amnesia for visual memories after hippocampal damage in rats.
J. Epp, J. R. Keith, S. C. Spanswick, J. C. Stone, G. T. Prusky, and R. J. Sutherland (2008)
Learn. Mem.
15, 214-221
|Abstract »|Full Text »|PDF »
Sleep transforms the cerebral trace of declarative memories.
S. Gais, G. Albouy, M. Boly, T. T. Dang-Vu, A. Darsaud, M. Desseilles, G. Rauchs, M. Schabus, V. Sterpenich, G. Vandewalle, et al. (2007)
PNAS
104, 18778-18783
|Abstract »|Full Text »|PDF »
The relationship between the field-shifting phenomenon and representational coherence of place cells in CA1 and CA3 in a cue-altered environment.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: 
