Sleep facilitates abstraction, but the exact mechanisms underpinning this are unknown. Here, we aimed to determine whether triggering reactivation in sleep could facilitate this process. We paired abstraction problems with sounds, then replayed these during either slow wave sleep (SWS) or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep to trigger memory reactivation in 27 human participants (19 female). This revealed performance improvements on 19 abstraction problems which were cued in REM, but not problems cued in SWS. Interestingly, the cue-related improvement was not significant until a follow up retest one week after the manipulation, suggesting that REM may initiate a sequence of plasticity events that requires more time to be implemented. Furthermore, memory-linked trigger sounds evoked distinct neural responses in REM, but not SWS. Overall, our findings suggest that targeted memory reactivation in REM can facilitate visual rule abstraction, although this effect takes time to unfold.

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant 610 number EP/R030952/1] and the European Research Council [grant SolutionSleep REP-SCI-611 681607-1].