Our ability to remember events and situations in our daily life demonstrates our ability to rapidly acquire new memories. There is a broad consensus that the hippocampal system (HS) plays a critical role in the formation and retrieval of such memories. A computational model is described that demonstrates how the HS may rapidly transform a transient pattern of activity representing an event or a...

Attention and memory cannot operate without each other. In this review, we discuss two lines of recent evidence that support this interdependence. First, memory has a limited capacity, and thus attention determines what will be encoded. Division of attention during encoding prevents the formation of conscious memories, although the role of attention in formation of unconscious memories is more ...

Consolidation of new memories depends on a crucial phase of protein synthesis. It is widely held that, once consolidated, memories are stable and resilient to disruption. However, established memories become labile when recalled and require another phase of protein synthesis to be maintained. Therefore, it has been proposed that when a memory is reactivated it must undergo additional consolidat...

A distinction between short-term memories lasting minutes to hours and long-term memories lasting for many days is that the formation of long-term memories requires new gene expression. In this review, the focus is on the current understanding of the relation of transcription to memory consolidation based on the data collected from behavioral studies performed primarily on genetically altered a...