LAUSR

Significance Long-term memories are considered to be optimally formed during sleep, but they may also be formed during wakefulness. Using behavioral indicators dissociating object and context memory in a novel-object recognition (NOR) paradigm, in combination with pharmacological inhibition of hippocampal activity during postencoding consolidation, we show that, in contrast to sleep consolidation, wake consolidation does not comprise the spatial–contextual integration of the NOR memory and is impaired by ongoing hippocampal activity. Accordingly, remote NOR memory after wake consolidation was even superior to that after sleep consolidation when tested in a context different from encoding. Our study directly comparing sleep and wake-dependent consolidation demonstrates that memories consolidated during wake and sleep differ in quality, but not necessarily in strength.