Memory consolidation
The gradual process by which new memories become stabilised in long-term storage, usually over hours to days, heavily involving sleep.
New experiences are first encoded in the hippocampus and later transferred to neocortical regions over sleep and time. Poor consolidation can produce episodic-memory deficits, but these look different from SDAM — SDAM is a lifelong baseline, not a consolidation failure.
This term appears in the research literature around aphantasia and SDAM to clarify what is and is not known about where the atypicality sits in the memory pipeline. It is likely not at the consolidation stage itself.