Sleep selectively consolidates images based on perceptual features

Sleep plays a role in memory consolidation. However, there is considerable debate about whether all memories, or only certain memories, benefit from consolidation during sleep. Previous investigations of sleep-dependent memory consolidation have explored top-down mechanisms on memory selection (e.g., future relevance) or utilized stimuli that are easily differentiated by participants (e.g., emotional stimuli). Here, we tested the role of bottom-up influences on sleep-dependent consolidation, specifically testing whether the intrinsic memorability of a stimulus is related to how likely an image is to be remembered after sleep. We found that sleep selectively consolidated only high memorability images. Previous work has shown that participants could not reliably predict image memorability, suggesting that our observed benefit for high memorability images reflected an automatic selection process. We provide the first evidence that one mechanism of selective memory consolidation during sleep is based on perceptual features, suggesting that unconscious “relevance” at encoding impacts subsequent consolidation.