Federico Stella

The project will focus on the computational investigation of the role of neural reactivations in memory. Since their discovery neural reactivations happening during sleep have emerged as an exceptional tool to investigate the process of memory formation in the brain. This phenomenon has been mostly associated with the hippocampus, an area known for its role in the processing of new memories and their initial storage. Continuous advancements in data acquisition techniques are giving us an unprecedented access to the activity of large-scale networks during sleep, in the hippocampus and in other cortical regions. At the same time, our theoretical understanding of the computations underlying neural reactivations and more in general memory representations, has only began to take shape. Combining mathematical modeling of neural networks and analysis of existing dataset, we will address some key aspects of this phenomenon such as: 1) The role of different sleep phases in regulating the reactivation process and in modulating the evolution of a memory trace. 2) The relationship of hippocampal reactivations to the process of (semantic) learning and knowledge generalization. 3) The relevance of reactivation statistical properties for learning in cortico-hippocampal networks.