Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuro-X Institute, Faculty of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Geneva 1202, Switzerland
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuro-X Institute, Faculty of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Geneva 1202, Switzerland.
eNeuro. 2024 Oct 10;11(10). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0256-24.2024. Print 2024 Oct.
Autonoetic consciousness (ANC), the ability to re-experience personal past events links episodic memory and self-consciousness by bridging awareness of oneself in a past event (i.e., during its encoding) with awareness of oneself in the present (i.e., during the reliving of a past event). Recent neuroscience research revealed a bodily form of self-consciousness, including the sense of agency (SoA) and the sense of body ownership (SoO) that are based on the integration of multisensory bodily inputs and motor signals. However, the relation between SoA and/or SoO with ANC is not known. Here, we used immersive virtual reality technology and motion tracking and investigated the potential association of SoA/SoO with ANC. For this, we exposed participants to different levels of visuomotor and perspectival congruency, known to modulate SoA and SoO, during the encoding of virtual scenes and collected ANC ratings 1 week after the encoding session. In a total of 74 healthy participants, we successfully induced systematic changes in SoA and SoO during encoding and found that ANC depended on the level of SoA experienced during encoding. Moreover, ANC was positively associated with SoA, but only for the scene encoded with preserved visuomotor and perspectival congruency, and such SoA-ANC coupling was absent for SoO and control questions. Collectively, these data provide behavioral evidence in a novel paradigm that links a key subjective component of bodily self-consciousness during encoding, SoA, to the subjective reliving of those encoded events from one's past, ANC.
自动认识意识（ANC），即重新体验个人过去事件的能力，通过将对过去事件中自我的意识（即在其编码期间）与对现在自我的意识（即在过去事件的重温期间）联系起来，将情景记忆和自我意识联系起来。最近的神经科学研究揭示了一种身体形式的自我意识，包括主体意识（SoA）和身体所有权意识（SoO），它们基于多感觉身体输入和运动信号的整合。然而，SoA 和/或 SoO 与 ANC 之间的关系尚不清楚。在这里，我们使用沉浸式虚拟现实技术和运动跟踪，研究了 SoA/SoO 与 ANC 之间的潜在关联。为此，我们在虚拟场景的编码过程中向参与者暴露了不同程度的视觉运动和透视一致性，这些已知的一致性会调节 SoA 和 SoO，并在编码会议结束后 1 周收集 ANC 评分。在总共 74 名健康参与者中，我们成功地在编码过程中诱导了 SoA 和 SoO 的系统性变化，并发现 ANC 取决于编码过程中体验到的 SoA 水平。此外，ANC 与 SoA 呈正相关，但仅适用于具有保留的视觉运动和透视一致性的场景，并且这种 SoA-ANC 耦合对于 SoO 和控制问题不存在。总的来说，这些数据在一个新颖的范式中提供了行为证据，将编码过程中身体自我意识的一个关键主观成分，即 SoA，与对过去事件的主观重温，即 ANC，联系起来。
