Abstract
IntroductionPersonally meaningful past episodes, defined as episodic memories (EM), are subjectively re‐experienced from the natural perspective and location of one's own body, as described by bodily self‐consciousness (BSC). Neurobiological mechanisms of memory consolidation suggest how initially irrelevant episodes may be remembered, if related information makes them gain importance later in time, leading for instance, to a retroactive memory strengthening in humans.MethodsUsing an immersive virtual reality system, we were able to directly manipulate the presence or absence of one's body, which seems to prevent a loss of initially irrelevant, self‐unrelated past events.Results and ConclusionOur findings provide an evidence that personally meaningful memories of our past are not fixed, but may be strengthened by later events, and that body‐related integration is important for the successful recall of episodic memories.
Highlights
Meaningful past episodes, defined as episodic memories (EM), are subjectively re-experienced from the natural perspective and location of one's own body, as described by bodily self-consciousness (BSC)
Post hoc t test revealed, as predicted from the results of experiment 1 and our previous study (Bréchet et al, 2019), that the sensitivity measure was higher in the body condition (M = 0.99, 95% CI = [0.71, 1.27]) versus the nobody condition (M = 0.74, 95% CI = [0.51, 0.98]) for items shown in phase 2 (t (14) = 2.56, p = .02, d = 0.55) (Figure 4a)
The present results suggest that the memory for real-life-like events is affected by self-related bodily cues, as we show that the memory for episodic events is better if those are encoded while one's body is present in the scene as compared to when the body is absent
Summary
Meaningful past episodes, defined as episodic memories (EM), are subjectively re-experienced from the natural perspective and location of one's own body, as described by bodily self-consciousness (BSC). Neurobiological mechanisms of memory consolidation suggest how initially irrelevant episodes may be remembered, if related information makes them gain importance later in time, leading for instance, to a retroactive memory strengthening in humans. Results and Conclusion: Our findings provide an evidence that personally meaningful memories of our past are not fixed, but may be strengthened by later events, and that body-related integration is important for the successful recall of episodic memories. Synaptic and behavioral tagging hypotheses have suggested a neurobiological mechanism of memory consolidation, by which initially unstable and weak memories are retroactively strengthened by conceptually related, that is, category-specific strong events (Frey & Morris, 1997; Moncada, 2007; Nomoto et al, 2016; Redondo & Morris, 2011; Wang, Redondo, & Morris, 2010). In a recent behavioral study (Dunsmoor, Murty, Davachi, & Phelps, 2015), authors showed that if participants received an electric shock while looking at a neutral picture, they remembered better those pictures seen prior to receiving the electric shock, which were conceptually related
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