Memory reactivation: replaying events past, present and future

Bruce McNaughton’s research involves the physiological and computational basis of cognition, with particular focus on memory and memory disorders, and the dynamic interactions among neuronal populations and synaptic plasticity mechanisms that underlie these phenomena. Bruce has made significant contributions to understanding central synaptic plasticity mechanisms (eg, LTP cooperativity and behavioural correlates, synaptic facilitation, synaptic depression), spatial information processing in hippocampus and cortex, cortico-hippocampal interactions and memory consolidation, and brain ageing. Bruce’s work has been characterised by a strong interaction between neuroscience theory (including computational modelling) and experiment. His current main interest is the role of hippocampal outflow to neocortex in memory replay and memory consolidation and the extraction of knowledge from episodic memory.

James L (Jay) McClelland is the founding director and current Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at Stanford University. Over the past 40 years he has developed and applied neural network models to address a wide range of aspects of human cognition and their neural basis. He is co-author of the two-volume work Parallel Distributed Processing with David R Rumelhart. In collaboration with Bruce McNaughton and others, James developed the complementary learning systems framework for understanding the neural basis of learning and memory. McClelland is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and has received many honours and awards, including Heineken Prize in Cognitive Science.

Kendrick Kay is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research at the University of Minnesota. He uses experimental and modelling techniques to investigate how the visual system represents stimuli and makes perceptual judgments about these stimuli. He combines expertise in cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging methods, computational modelling, and data analysis techniques.

Lila Davachi is Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. She received her BA in Psychology from Barnard College and received her PhD in Neurobiology at Yale University where she conducted early glucose metabolism studies of the medial temporal lobe in non-human primates. She moved on to study human memory, focusing on whether the human hippocampus and perirhinal cortex make qualitatively distinctive contributions to episodic memory. She began her research lab at New York University in 2004 where her work has focused on elucidating new aspects of human memory behaviour as well as harnessing different forms of brain imaging to elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms of memory encoding, retrieval and consolidation. Her work has identified novel signatures of human memory, including the discovery that local hippocampal activity patterns and hippocampal-cortical connectivity persist into post-encoding time periods and support memory reactivation/replay and strengthening. Her work has also been instrumental in highlighting how sequential representations become ‘carved up’ to form distinct mnemonic episodes. She was recognised early in her career with the prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and was recently elected into the Society for Experimental Psychologists.

Anna Schapiro received her BS from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems and PhD from Princeton University in Psychology and Neuroscience. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania starting July 2019. Her research draws on neuroimaging, behavioural, and computational modelling techniques to investigate the learning of novel information and its consolidation during sleep.

Julie Seibt obtained her PhD in Developmental Neurobiology from the University Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. She started studying sleep and its influence on brain plasticity as a postdoc in the laboratory of Marcos Frank at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she developed a specific interest in the influence of sleep oscillations on synaptic and dendritic physiology. For her second postdoc, she went to Charité-Universtätsmedizin Berlin and used in vivo calcium imaging to monitor activity in cortical dendrites of sleeping rodents. She is now Lecturer in Sleep and Plasticity at the University of Surrey. Her main research interest is to understand the specific role of sleep stages in synaptic plasticity and memory, focusing on molecular and cellular changes in cortical dendrites and synapses. She takes a multidisciplinary approach, including electrophysiology, molecular, in vivo calcium imaging and behaviour in the rodent model.

After graduating in physics, Adrien Peyrache studied cognitive science in a joint MSc program at UPMC and Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). Then he obtained a PhD at the Collège de France. His work focused on the neuronal substrate of sleep-dependent learning and memory. He did one year of postdoctoral training at the CNRS (France) where he studied the interplay between brain oscillations during sleep, crucial for memory consolidation. He then moved to the laboratory of György Buzsaki at New York University where he studied the neuronal circuits and dynamics that govern activity in the brain’s navigation system. In 2016, he started his lab at Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University. His research aims at unravelling the neural processes that generate a neuronal code for space in the brain, both during wakefulness and sleep when memories of previous experiences are ‘replayed’.

Liset M de la Prida runs the Laboratorio de Circuitos Neuronales at the Instituto Cajal in Madrid. She graduated in Physics in 1994 and earned her PhD in Neuroscience in 1998. She has held visiting positions in the laboratories of David Brown (London), Leon Lagnado (Cambridge) and Steven J Schiff (USA) that allowed her to acquire a broad background and expertise to study brain function. After a postdoc with Richard Miles in Paris she got her research position at the Instituto Cajal in 2007. The main goal of her lab is to understand the function of hippocampal and para-hippocampal circuits. Dr de la Prida serves as an Editor for prestigious journals including the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience Methods and eNeuro, and has commissioning duties in the American Epilepsy Society and the Spanish Society of Neuroscience. She is a leading international expert in the study of the basic mechanisms of ripples and fast ripples.

Dr George Dragoi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT. He holds an MD from the Gr T Popa University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Iasi, Romania, and a PhD in Behavioral and Neural Science from Rutgers University where he worked in the laboratory of Dr Gyorgy Buzsaki. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Dr Susumu Tonegawa. Dr Dragoi studies the neurophysiological basis of the organisation of hippocampal neurons into cellular assemblies and their dynamic grouping during novel spatial exploration and in response to long-term synaptic plasticity. Recently, he revealed the existence of preconfigured cellular assemblies that pre-play in time the spatial sequences occurring during a future novel spatial experience.

Dr Kari Hoffman was recently appointed as an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University, after spending 10 years leading a research group in the Psychology Department at York University. Her laboratory is focused on discovering the dynamics and mechanisms of plasticity in neural ensembles during perception and memory formation in primates. Dr Hoffman received her PhD in Neuroscience in the lab of Dr Carol Barnes and Professor Bruce McNaughton at the University of Arizona, with a project that pioneered multi-electrode array (MEA) technology using high-density recordings of neural populations, before moving to Germany for a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr Nikos Logothetis at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen. Dr Hoffman is a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and received new investigator awards from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. She has just finished leading a Brain Canada Multi-Investigator Research Initiative to modify neural dynamics in memory-related brain structures.

Karunesh Ganguly is a neurologist and a research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco. He graduated from Stanford University and then completed his MD/PhD degrees through the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of California, San Diego. He is also the Director of the Laboratory of Plasticity and Neural Engineering. The laboratory’s research program focuses on understanding the role of sleep-dependent plasticity on consolidation after motor learning and recovery from injury. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE Award) by President Obama in 2014 and was selected for the 2015 New Innovator Award by the NIH Office of the Director.

Brendon Watson specialises in neuroscience and psychiatry with an emphasis on the use of high throughput tools and tool development for neurobiologic studies. During his PhD he used two-photon microscopy to study the behaviour of neurons in local cortical microcircuits. He pursued a residency in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College as well postdoctoral work at New York University where used high channel-count silicon probe electrodes to report novel properties of the prefrontal cortex. He received the National Institute for Mental Health’s Outstanding Resident Award, the American Psychiatric Association’s Lilly Research Fellowship and the Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellowship. He is now combining new approaches to electrical recordings with optogenetic and behavioural tools to deepen our understanding of brain circuits over varying brain states.

Dr Guang Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at Columbia University, New York, USA. Her research focuses on understanding how sleep, anesthetics and immune cells affect changes of neural circuits underlying sensory processing and memory formation. Using in vivo two-photon microscopy to monitor fluorescently-labelled neurons in the living mouse cortex, her recent studies indicate that sleep has multifaceted functions in learning and memory consolidation: non-rapid eye movement sleep promotes new synapse formation after motor learning by reactivating task-related neurons, while rapid eye movement sleep selectively eliminates and maintains newly formed synapses via dendritic calcium spike-dependent mechanisms.