Repetition dynamically and rapidly increases cortical, but not hippocampal, offline reactivation

No sooner is an experience over than its neural representation begins to be transformed through memory reactivation during offline periods. The lion’s share of prior research has focused on understanding offline reactivation within the hippocampus. However, it is hypothesized that consolidation processes involve offline reactivation in cortical regions as well as coordinated reactivation in the hippocampus and cortex. Using fMRI, we presented novel and repeated paired associates to participants during encoding and measured offline memory reactivation for those events during an immediate post-encoding rest period. post-encoding reactivation frequency of repeated and once-presented events did not differ in the hippocampus. However, offline reactivation in widespread cortical regions and hippocampal-cortical coordinated reactivation were significantly enhanced for repeated events. These results provide evidence that repetition might facilitate the distribution of memory representations across cortical networks, a hallmark of systems-level consolidation. Interestingly, we found that offline reactivation frequency in both hippocampus and cortex explained variance in behavioral success on an immediate associative recognition test for the once-presented information, potentially indicating a role of offline reactivation in maintaining these novel, weaker, memories. Together, our findings highlight that endogenous offline reactivation can be robustly and significantly modulated by study repetition.