The hippocampus is crucial for forming non-hippocampal long-term memory during sleep by Anuck Sawangjit et al in Nature 6 December 2018

Hippocampus needed for consolidation of novel-object memories.

Sawangjit et al start with the accepted distinction between hippocampus-dependent and non-hippocampus-dependent memory. By way of summary, the former includes object-place recognition. The latter includes novel-object recognition. Memory processing comprises three stages: encoding, consolidation and retrieval. With an ingenious experiment involving rats, they showed that even non-hippocampus-dependent memory requires a hippocampal system for the memory consolidation stage. Moreover, this takes place during sleep. They then propose that this hippocampal system introduces ‘context-related representations’ to help achieve such consolidation. Even novel-object recognition seems to need a time and space element to the sustainable formation of the memory of it.

Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0716-8

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