Erin Wamsley
Furman University, SC·Neuroscience
Why do we remember some things and forget others? New memories are fragile.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
memory consolidation
sleep
offline wakefulness
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Test whether memories are reactivated and strengthened during seconds-long periods of waking rest, as they are during sleep, using EEG combined with measures of pupil size, reported thoughts and behavior.
- Test whether waking rest and sleep act in sequence, with sleep required to fully consolidate an initial memory boost gained during brief rest after learning.
- Identify which waking states in the first minutes after learning best consolidate memory, focusing on states with slow EEG oscillations, the slow rhythms in the brain's electrical activity.
- Determine the time window during which resting wakefulness best prepares a new memory for consolidation during the sleep that follows.
- Track how salience cues, signals that mark information as important, change how a memory evolves across wake and sleep, using EEG to measure brain states.
More about the research
To last, they must be strengthened and reorganized, a process called consolidation. Sleep is known to strengthen memories. Consolidation may also begin earlier, during brief moments of rest while awake, such as the seconds when we zone out. Both projects ask how waking rest and sleep work together. They test the idea that memory is processed in steps across the 24-hour day: rest stabilizes a new memory for a short time, and sleep makes the change last.
Why it matters
This work could give a fuller picture of how long-term memories form, one that studies of a single brain state, time point or memory process have missed. Knowing when waking rest and sleep strengthen new memories could eventually inform ways to enhance memory, a goal the projects name.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Azahara Oliva Gonzalez
Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Investigate the mechanisms by which recent memories are replayed during sharp-wave ripples in contracted-pupil substates of NREM sleep, using hippocampal electrophysiology with pupillometry in naturally sleeping mice.
Genevieve Albouy
University of Utah, UT·Neuroscience
Test whether temporal interference stimulation (TIS), a non-invasive way to stimulate deep brain regions, applied to the hippocampus enhances offline motor sequence learning in young healthy adults, compared with sham stimulation.
LIla Davachi
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether ending a STEM lecture with a visuospatial rather than a verbal summary enhances offline neural replay, the brain's reactivation of recent learning during rest, measured with fMRI right after learning.
The school
Furman University: 3 labs on PI Pages.
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