Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025 Oct;29(10):876-878.
doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2025.07.008. Epub 2025 Aug 28.

Awake reactivation is not a uniform process

Amir Tal  1 , Eitan Schechtman  2
Affiliations

Awake reactivation is not a uniform process

Amir Tal et al. Trends Cogn Sci. 2025 Oct.

Abstract

Memories are consolidated during restful wakefulness, but the mechanisms underlying this process are poorly understood. We argue that wakeful reactivation is not monolithic: it encompasses non-conscious and conscious processes with varying levels of elaboration and diverging consequences. Refining reactivation as a concept may help avoid conflicting results on wake consolidation.

Keywords: consolidation; memory; reactivation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Competitive (online) vs. integrative (offline) memory dynamics following reactivation during wakefulness.
We propose that conscious retrieval involves selection of one prevailing memory, and thus leads to competitive dynamics (left), increasing the strength of a selected memory (blue line and cloud) at the expense of non-selected alternatives (yellow and red lines and clouds). We propose that non-conscious reactivation is non-selective, and thus leads to integrative dynamics (right), strengthening and integrating all associated memories.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Paller et al. (2021) Memory and Sleep: How Sleep Cognition Can Change the Waking Mind for the Better. Annu Rev Psychol 72, 123–150 - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wamsley EJ (2022) Offline memory consolidation during waking rest. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 441–453
    1. Schapiro AC et al. (2018) Human hippocampal replay during rest prioritizes weakly learned information and predicts memory performance. Nature Communications 9, 3920
    1. Rawson AB et al. (2024) Memory reactivation generates new, adaptive behaviours that reach beyond direct experience. Sci Rep 14, 30097. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Hoffman LJ et al. (2025) Awake targeted memory reactivation doesn’t work. Mem Cognit 53, 453–466