CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN
COGNITION & NEUROSCIENCES/ConnexConnex

The sequential structure of many of our experiences remains stable over time. For example, every morning we might meet the same people on our commute to work. These regularities help us to successfully complete everyday tasks and plan future actions. One brain region that is thought to play a key role in learning and remembering regularities in the environment is the hippocampus. Prior investigations into the function of the human hippocampus revealed its role in encoding and preserving the temporal order of episodic experiences and the representation of well-learned sequences in declarative memory. Importantly, more recent evidence suggests that the hippocampus is also involved in motor sequence learning, a process traditionally associated with the procedural memory system. Although these prior studies suggest that the encoding and representation of well-learned sequences recruit common brain areas in different memory domains, it remains unclear to what extent the underlying neural mechanisms during memory consolidation are shared. In the current study, we used fMRI to investigate hippocampal and non-hippocampal waking replay after motor and object sequence learning and tested its contribution to memory consolidation in the different memory domains.