Sleep in humans stabilizes pattern separation performance

Abstract

Replay of hippocampal neural representations during sleep is thought to promote systems consolidation of declarative memory. How this reprocessing of memory during sleep affects the hippocampal representation itself, is unclear. Here we tested hippocampal stimulus processing (i.e., pattern separation) before and after periods of sleep and wakefulness in humans (female and male participants). Pattern separation deteriorated across the wake period but remained stable across sleep (p = 0.013) with this sleep-wake difference being most pronounced for stimuli with low similarity to targets (p = 0.006). Stimuli with the highest similarity showed a reversed pattern with reduced pattern separation performance after sleep (p = 0.038). Pattern separation performance was positively correlated with sleep spindle density, slow oscillation density, and theta power phase-locked to slow oscillations. Sleep, presumably by neural memory replay, shapes hippocampal representations and enhances computations of pattern separation to subsequent presentation of similar stimuli.