Tang W, Shin JD, Frank LM, Jadhav SP (2017), “Hippocampal-prefrontal reactivation during learning is stronger in awake as compared to sleep states”, Journal of Neuroscience, 37(49): 11789-11805.
This study that revealed a surprising difference between awake and sleep replay. Despite the dogma that sleep replay is primarily responsible for reactivating memories of our experiences for permanent long-term storage, we found that replay in the hippocampal-prefrontal cortical circuit is stronger in waking states than in sleep states, and awake replay recapitulates spatial memories much more precisely than sleep replay, which is inherently noisy. These results strongly indicated that awake and sleep replay have different functional roles, and further challenged a major dogma about the role of sleep replay in memory consolidation.
Featured in a Journal of Neuroscience article:
“PFC–Hippocampus Interactions during Sleep and Awake Ripples”.
Featured on the Brandeis Science blog:
“Communicating Memory Information Between the Hippocampus and Prefrontal Cortex”
Also, see a related review:
Tang W, Jadhav SP (2018), “Sharp-wave ripples as a signature of hippocampal-prefrontal reactivation for memory during sleep and waking states”, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.