Cover image

During sleep, recently acquired memories are consolidated and thereby stabilized. In this issue of Learning & Memory, Schecthman et al. (LearnMem 36–42) report that the contexts in which memories are embedded upon acquisition guide their consolidation trajectories in humans. The cover art shows an artistic interpretation of these results, demonstrated using Georges Seurat's 1886 painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” During sleep, the memory of a specific element in the portrayed scene—a black dog sniffing the grass—is reactivated. Whereas most models of memory processing during sleep would have dismissed the effects of the dog's contextual surroundings on its consolidation trajectory, our data suggest that the context in which the dog was encoded during that Sunday afternoon is itself reactivated during sleep in a manner that impacts subsequent retrieval.