Author:

Keywords:

Reconsolidation, Consolidation, Motor learning, Sequence task, Science & Technology, Social Sciences, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Behavioral Sciences, Neurosciences, Psychology, Experimental, Neurosciences & Neurology, Psychology, Memory updating, PROTEIN-SYNTHESIS, POSTTRAUMATIC-STRESS, DECLARATIVE MEMORY, EXTINCTION, FEAR, SKILL, CONSOLIDATION, INTERFERENCE, ACQUISITION, SLEEP, Adolescent, Adult, Female, Humans, Learning, Male, Memory, Motor Activity, Psychomotor Performance, Time Factors, Young Adult, 1109 Neurosciences, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology, 3209 Neurosciences, 5202 Biological psychology, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology

Abstract:

When a stable memory is reactivated it becomes transiently labile and requires restabilization, a process known as reconsolidation. Animal studies have convincingly demonstrated that during reconsolidation memories are modifiable and can be erased when reactivation is followed by an interfering intervention. Few studies have been conducted in humans, however, and results are inconsistent regarding the extent to which a memory can be degraded. We used a motor sequence learning paradigm to show that the length of reactivation constitutes a crucial boundary condition determining whether human motor memories can be degraded. In our first experiment, we found that a short reactivation (less than 60 sec) renders the memory labile and susceptible to degradation through interference, while a longer reactivation does not. In our second experiment, we reproduce these results and show a significant linear relationship between the length of memory reactivation and the detrimental effect of the interfering task performed afterwards, i.e., the longer the reactivation, the smaller the memory loss due to interference. Our data suggest that reactivation via motor execution activates a time-dependent process that initially destabilizes the memory, which is then followed by restabilization during further practice.