The dorsal hippocampus is crucial for mammalian spatial memory, but its exact role in item memory is still hotly debated. Recent evidence in humans suggested that the hippocampus might be selectively involved in item short-term memory to deal with an increasing memory load. In this study, we sought to test this hypothesis. To this aim we developed…

Both sleep spindles and slow oscillations have been implicated in sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Whereas spindles occur during both light and deep sleep, slow oscillations are restricted to deep sleep, raising the possibility of greater consolidation-related spindle involvement during deep sleep. We assessed declarative memory retention…