Dr. rer.nat. Nicolas Lutz

Sleep and Memory

Projec Leader: Dr. rer.nat. Nicolas Lutz

Over the last decades, research has established a central role of sleep for the formation of long-term memory. Sleep-dependent transformation of initially labile memory representations into more stable forms is accompanied by a reorganization process that not only improves memory quantitatively but supposedly also entails qualitative changes. Our research focusses on investigating the formation of abstracted, more general, memories representing the “gist” of experiences, which have been linked to the formation of cognitive schemata, problem-solving, predictive coding, gaining insight and creativity. We mainly examine these questions in healthy participants using behavioral and electroencephalographic techniques.

Publications on this topic:

Lutz ND, Admard M, Genzoni E, Born J, Rauss K. Occipital sleep spindles predict sequence learning in a visuo-motor task. Sleep. 2021;0(0):1-18. doi:10.1093/sleep/zsab056
Lutz ND, Born J. Sleep to make more of your memories: Decoding hidden rules from encoded information. Sleep Med Rev. 2019;47:122-124. doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2019.07.009
Lutz ND, Wolf I, Hübner S, Born J, Rauss K. Sleep strengthens predictive sequence coding. J Neurosci. 2018;38(42):8989-9000. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1352-18.2018
Lutz ND, Diekelmann S, Hinse-Stern P, Born J, Rauss K. Sleep supports the slow abstraction of gist from visual perceptual memories. Sci Rep. 2017;7(January):42950. doi:10.1038/srep42950