Dr. rer. nat. Nicolas Lutz

Sleep and Memory

Project 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:

Yang, X., Miao, X., Schweiggart, F., Großmann, S., Rauss, K., Hallschmid, M., Born, J., & Lutz, N. D. (2025). The effect of fasting on human memory consolidation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 218, 108034. Read more

Martínez-Albert, E., Lutz, N. D., Hübener, R., Dimitrov, S., Lange, T., Born, J., & Besedovsky, L. (2024). Sleep promotes T-cell migration towards CCL19 via growth hormone and prolactin signaling in humans. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 118, 69–77. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Martínez-Albert, E., Friedrich, H., Born, J., & Besedovsky, L. (2024). Sleep shapes the associative structure underlying pattern completion in multielement event memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(9), e2314423121. Read more

Miao, X., Müller, C., Lutz, N. D., Yang, Q., Waszak, F., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2023). Sleep consolidates stimulus–response learning. Learning & Memory, 30(9), 175–184. Read more

Pitsillos, T., Wikström, A.-K., Skalkidou, A., Derntl, B., Hallschmid, M., Lutz, N. D., Ngai, E., Sundström Poromaa, I., & Wikman, A. (2022). Association Between Objectively Assessed Sleep and Depressive Symptoms During Pregnancy and Post-partum. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, 2, 807817. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Admard, M., Genzoni, E., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2021). Occipital sleep spindles predict sequence learning in a visuo-motor task. Sleep, 44(8), 1–18. Read more

Lutz, N. D., & Born, J. (2019). Sleep to make more of your memories: Decoding hidden rules from encoded information. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 47, 122–124. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Lemes, E., Krubitzer, L., Collin, S. P., Haverkamp, S., & Peichl, L. (2018). The rod signaling pathway in marsupial retinae. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202089. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Wolf, I., Hübner, S., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2018). Sleep strengthens predictive sequence coding. The Journal of Neuroscience, 38(42), 8989–9000. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Diekelmann, S., Hinse-Stern, P., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2017). Sleep supports the slow abstraction of gist from visual perceptual memories. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 42950. Read more