Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in infants – The impact of language on the type of transformation

• Applicant: Dr. Manuela Friedrich
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468645090

From very early stages of development on, infants are able to retain details of their experience as well as to extract similarities and structural dependencies in their environment. Emerging evidence suggests that sleep in infancy may support both types of memory, representations for specific episodic details and those for general categorical information. However, given the immaturity of the infant hippocampus, the nature of these earliest memories is controversial, and little is known about what determines the transfer of a new experience into either specific or general memory. Based on our foregoing work on sleep-dependent memory consolidation in infants and the role of language in guiding categorization, we hypothesize that language is a crucial factor that determines the level of sleep-dependent gist abstraction and triggers the transformation of perceptual representations into semantic memory. We further hypothesize that this semantization preserves the details of the originally encoded representations and enables the parallel consolidation of specific memories during the same nap. In contrast, we expect nonverbal information to be consolidated at only one level of generality. We will test these hypotheses by examining the consolidation of new memories that contain either verbal or only nonverbal information. The comparison of brain responses in infants, toddlers, and adults during encoding, consolidation, and subsequent access of new memories will provide crucial information for specifying the processes of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and for characterizing the nature of memory formed in the earliest human life.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5434: Information Abstraction During Sleep