The role of bodily self-consciousness in episodic memory of naturalistic events: An immersive virtual reality study

Abstract

Abstract Recent studies suggest that the human body plays a critical role in encoding and retrieving episodic memories of past events, yet the precise relationship between bodily self-consciousness and memory formation, especially in real-life contexts, remains a topic of ongoing research. The present study investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and episodic memory using immersive virtual reality (VR) technology. Participants were exposed to a naturalistic environment with ecological events while their visuomotor feedback was manipulated in three conditions: synchronous, asynchronous, and no-body. The results revealed that synchronous visuomotor feedback led to a higher sense of presence and better memory performance, a higher sense of remembering, and better associative memory compared to asynchronous or no-body feedback. These findings are significant because it links sense of bodily-self in space and episodic memory encoding and support the role of bodily-self-consciousness as a fundamental component of episodic remembering and highlight its implication in all dimensions of episodic memory. The study sheds light on the complex interplay between the body and memory processes and highlights the potential of embodiment and VR technology in studying and enhancing human cognition.