Many thanks to the reviewers for their useful comments and feedback.

We show that memory reactivation during awake rest plays a critical role in extracting new, unobserved associations to support adaptive behavioural strategies such as inference. 6/6

TMR improved discovery of new, non-directly trained associations, and no change was observed for directly trained associations. 5/6

We demonstrate that TMR during awake rest enhances performance on associative memory tests. 4/6

We investigated this using a pre-registered, within-subject human study design with a rich behavioural paradigm. We used contextual Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR) to causally manipulate memory reactivation during awake rest. 3/6

Periods of rest and sleep are reported to facilitate adaptive behaviours, such as our ability to make inferences, perform abstraction and acquire insight. However, the mechanism by which these adaptive behaviours emerge remains unclear. 2/6