Reconsolidation of the human declarative memory

FORCATO CECILIA

Santa Cruz

Congreso; VII reunión Anual - Sociedad Chilena de Neurociencias; 2011

The reconsolidation hypothesis states that a consolidated memory could againbecomeunstable and susceptible to facilitation or impairment for a discrete period of time after areminder presentation. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in very diverse speciesand types of memory, including the human procedural memory of a motor skill task.We design a new paradigm that involves learning a list of non-sense syllable pairs,associated to a specific context (light, image and sound) and we demonstrate for the firsttime, the human declarative memory reconsolidation.Moreover, we demonstrate that the reconsolidation process does not always occur whena memory is retrieved. On the contrary, it requires a reminder with a specificstructure,and it seems that the mismatch between what the subject expects and whatactually happens to be crucial. Furthermore, we provide evidence to the potentialfunctionality of this fenomenon: the strengthening of the original trace and theincorporation of new information into the reactivated memory (memory updating).