Juvenile rat's sleep enables schema memory across episodes before expression of memory for individual episodes

Schema memory refers to generalized knowledge extracted from multiple related episodes. According to systems consolidation theory, such representations emerge during sleep through the transformation of hippocampus-dependent episodic memories into neocortical schema representations. Whether this process requires mature episodic memory expression during early development remains unclear. Here, we examined schema formation in infant rats with an immature hippocampus. At postnatal day (PD) 25, pups (n=24) were tested in an adapted object-place paradigm enabling abstraction of a spatial regularity across eight consecutive episodes. Following encoding, pups either slept or remained awake for two hours, and schema memory was tested 22 hours later. Control groups were exposed to pseudorandomized object configurations. Schema memory was expressed only after exposure to spatial regularities and only when sleep followed encoding. To directly assess episodic memory under comparable conditions, an additional group of pups (n=12) was tested in a standard single-episode object-place recognition (OPR) task with post-encoding sleep. At a 4-hours test, these pups did not show episodic object-place memory. These findings indicate that sleep supports schema memory formation during early life under conditions in which the expression of robust single-episode memory is not yet evident, suggesting that schema abstraction in infancy does not depend on fully developed hippocampal episodic representations.