CRC 654, Project A16: The role of reward- and novelty-related dopaminergic signals in sleep-mediated memory consolidation

Sleep promotes consolidation of declarative memories. Here we investigate whether thisconsolidation effect can be found in particular for items that are tagged during encoding,either by being presented in the context of a reward or by being singled out as novel. Inparticular, we assess the flexibility of such tagging processes by manipulating the relativereward (or relative novelty) of a stimulus while keeping absolute reward (or absolute novelty)constant. We hypothesize that both, reward and novelty are coded flexibly by thedopaminergic system and that the activity of a network comprising the ventral tegmental area,the ventral striatum and the hippocampus during encoding is crucial for consolidation ofmemories during sleep.