First-person view of one's body in immersive virtual reality: Influence on episodic memory.

Lucie Bréchet,Baptiste Gauthier,Quentin Theillaud,Robin Mange,Bruno Herbelin,Andrea Serino,Olaf Blanke,Jane Elizabeth Aspell

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0197763

Lucie Bréchet, Baptiste Gauthier + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197763

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Abstract

Episodic memories (EMs) are recollections of contextually rich and personally relevant past events. EM has been linked to the sense of self, allowing one to mentally travel back in subjective time and re-experience past events. However, the sense of self has recently been linked to online multisensory processing and bodily self-consciousness (BSC). It is currently unknown whether EM depends on BSC mechanisms. Here, we used a new immersive virtual reality (VR) system that maintained the perceptual richness of life episodes and fully controlled the experimental stimuli during encoding and retrieval, including the participant’s body. Our data reveal a classical EM finding, which shows that memory for complex real-life like scenes decays over time. However, here we also report a novel finding that delayed retrieval performance can be enhanced when participants view their body as part of the virtual scene during encoding. This body effect was not observed when no virtual body or a moving control object was shown, thereby linking the sense of self, and BSC in particular, to EMs. The present VR methodology and the present behavioral findings will enable to study key aspects of EM in healthy participants and may be especially beneficial for the restoration of self-relevant memories in future experiments.

Highlights

A defining feature of episodic memory (EM) is the capacity to provide information about the content of our conscious personal experiences of “when” and “where” events occurred as well as “what” happened [1,2]
Given the link of bodily self-consciousness (BSC) with subjective experience and previous claims that subjective reexperiencing of specific past events is a fundamental component of EM [2,18], we argue that multisensory bodily processing may be of relevance for BSC, and for consciousness concerning past events
The present virtual reality (VR) setup allowed us to project the same 3D virtual scenes during the encoding and retrieval sessions, providing us arguably with a level of experimental control that is comparable to examinations of classical word/picture-based recognition paradigms [99,100,101,102], which are typically used to study memory

Summary

Introduction

A defining feature of episodic memory (EM) is the capacity to provide information about the content of our conscious personal experiences of “when” and “where” events occurred as well as “what” happened [1,2]. Plancher et al [87] suggested that interactions with the naturalistic environment created with VR enhanced spatial memory Despite these important achievements, these virtual environments were mostly using non-immersive VR systems, did not employ real life like virtual scenes, and did not use VR technology that allows integrating the participants’ body (and multisensory bodily stimulation) for the tested virtual life episodes. The present experiments had one major technological and one major scientific goal: (1) develop and test real life-like memory in the laboratory with virtual episodes using immersive VR and (2) investigate whether multisensory bodily stimulations that have been shown to impact BSC, perception, and egocentric cognition modulates EM. We performed a third (control) experiment in order to test whether the effect of multisensory bodily stimulation that we observed in the second experiment is specific to multisensory bodily cues

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