Flavio J. Schmidig

Flavio J. Schmidig

Cognitive Neuroscientist interested in Memory and Sleep.

Memory consolidation; rest and sleep consolidation; no-report memory; hippocampus; passive memory

EEG; iEEG; eye-tracking;

Publications

Here are some selected publications listed. You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Journal Articles

Anticipatory eye gaze as a marker of memory

Published in Nature Communication Psychology, 2025

Using the MEGA paradigm, anticipatory eye movements during repeated movie viewing provide a nonverbal, single-trial index of associative memory—predicting salient events seconds in advance, enabling machine-learning classification, dissociating recollection (gaze) from familiarity (pupil dilation), and revealing sleep-related retrieval benefits—thus extending memory assessment beyond verbal report.

Recommended citation: Schmidig, F. J., Yamin, D., Sharon, O., Nadu, Y., Nir, J., Ranganath, C., & Nir, Y. (2025). Anticipatory eye gaze as a marker of memory. Communications Psychology, 3(1), 122.
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A visual paired associate learning (vPAL) paradigm to study memory consolidation during sleep

Published in Journal of Sleep Research, 2024

Introducing vPAL, a one-shot face–animal association paradigm, we show that a daytime nap (vs. wake) stabilizes recognition and improves discrimination without boosting cued recall, and that higher sleep spindle density predicts greater recognition stability, highlighting a simple paradigm to probe sleep-dependent memory consolidation across populations.

Recommended citation: Schmidig, F. J., Geva‐Sagiv, M., Falach, R., Yakim, S., Gat, Y., Sharon, O., ... & Nir, Y. (2024). A visual paired associate learning (vPAL) paradigm to study memory consolidation during sleep. Journal of Sleep Research, 33(5), e14151.
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Episodic long-term memory formation during slow-wave sleep

Published in eLife, 2024

Targeted to slow-wave troughs, novel word pairs played during sleep were encoded and later shaped waking semantic decisions up to 36 hours later, accompanied by increased neural complexity, theta on subsequent peaks, and ramping fast spindles that likely supported consolidation.

Recommended citation: F. J. Schmidig, S. Ruch, K.Henke (2024) Episodic long-term memory formation during slow-wave sleep eLife 12:RP89601.
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Closed-loop modulation of local slow oscillations in human NREM sleep

Published in NeuroImage, 2022

We introduce TOPOSO, a real-time EEG closed-loop algorithm that topographically targets local UP/DOWN states of slow oscillations—overcoming single-channel limitations—producing fewer but region-specific stimulations, reliably hitting frontal/sensorimotor/centro-parietal UP-states in naps and transiently enhancing the targeted local state before a canonical frontal slow oscillation emerges, thereby enabling precise modulation and study of local slow-oscillation function.

Recommended citation: Ruch, S., Schmidig, F. J., Knüsel, L., & Henke, K. (2022). Closed-loop modulation of local slow oscillations in human NREM sleep. Neuroimage, 264, 119682.
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