Schedule of Events | Symposia

Evaluating the role of left ventral premotor cortex in bodily self-consciousness and autobiographical memory

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Utkarsh Gupta^1,2, Peter Bright², Alex Clarke^3,4, Lily Vissouze^5,6, Varvara Belova², Abin Andrews², Jane E. Aspell²; ¹University of North Dakota, ²Anglia Ruskin University, ³University of Cambridge, ⁴University of Warwick, ⁵Sorbonne University, ⁶University of Paris

Autobiographical memories are memories of personal semantic knowledge and episodic experiences. Given that there is sensory input from the body during all life events raises the question of whether a representation of our bodily self is inherent in our episodic autobiographical memories. In keeping with this, we predicted that embodiment of a child-like body would enhance the recollection of episodic childhood autobiographical memories. Representations of the bodily self rely on multisensory and sensorimotor integration in brain areas including the left ventral premotor cortex. We first investigated if stimulation to left ventral premotor cortex increased the strength of embodiment of a child’s body during a virtual reality based full body illusion experiment. We hypothesised that activation of the left ventral premotor cortex by anodal transcranial direct current stimulation would result in a stronger illusion of embodiment of the child’s body (compared to sham stimulation). We further investigated if changes in embodiment affected the participants’ ability to recollect childhood autobiographical memory, consistent with a link between bodily self and autobiographical memory. We did not find any significant differences in the strength of embodiment and autobiographical memory scores, suggesting that the bodily self is not solely dependent on left ventral premotor cortex involvement. However, we observed a positive correlation between the child’s body ownership experience scores and episodic childhood autobiographical memory scores only following anodal stimulation and not sham stimulation. The study provides initial evidence for the involvement of the left ventral premotor cortex in the interaction between bodily self and autobiographical memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic