Publication

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

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.

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Related concepts (34)
Episodic memory
Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at particular times and places; for example, the party on one's 7th birthday. Along with semantic memory, it comprises the category of explicit memory, one of the two major divisions of long-term memory (the other being implicit memory).
Semantic memory
Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that humans have accumulated throughout their lives. This general knowledge (word meanings, concepts, facts, and ideas) is intertwined in experience and dependent on culture. New concepts are learned by applying knowledge learned from things in the past. Semantic memory is distinct from episodic memory—the memory of experiences and specific events that occur in one's life that can be recreated at any given point.
Autobiographical memory
Autobiographical memory (AM) is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and semantic (general knowledge and facts about the world) memory. It is thus a type of explicit memory. Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) proposed that autobiographical memory is constructed within a self-memory system (SMS), a conceptual model composed of an autobiographical knowledge base and the working self.
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