Body illusion helps unlock memories, new study finds

New research has discovered that briefly altering how we perceive our own body can help unlock autobiographical memories—potentially even those from the early stages of childhood.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study is the first to find that adults can better access their early memories after embodying a childlike version of their own face.

Led by neuroscientists at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge, the study of 50 adult participants involved an “enfacement illusion,” which allows people to experience a face they see on a computer screen as their own, as though looking in a mirror.

The participants viewed a live video of their own face, digitally altered using an image filter to resemble how they might have looked as children. As they moved their heads, the face on screen mirrored their movements, creating a strong sense that the childlike face was their own. A control group viewed their unaltered adult faces under the same conditions.

After the illusion, participants completed an autobiographical memory interview, recalling events from both their childhood and the past year.

The researchers recorded and quantified the amount of detail that participants provided when recalling their episodic autobiographical memories. These are memories that enable one to mentally relive previous experiences and mentally “time travel” back to events from one’s own past.

The study is the first to show that access to remote memories can be affected by changes to the bodily self and the results found that participants who viewed the childlike version of their face recalled significantly more episodic childhood memories than those who saw their adult face.

The researchers believe the findings offer new insights into how bodily self-perception interacts with memory and could pave the way for new techniques to access previously inaccessible memories, including possibly those from the “childhood amnesia” phase, which is typically before the age of three.

Lead author Dr. Utkarsh Gupta conducted the study as part of his Ph.D. at Anglia Ruskin University and is now a Cognitive Neuroscience Research Fellow at the University of North Dakota. Dr. Gupta said, “All the events that we remember are not just experiences of the external world, but are also experiences of our body, which is always present.

“We discovered that temporary changes to the bodily self, specifically, embodying a childlike version of one’s own face, can significantly enhance access to childhood memories. This might be because the brain encodes bodily information as part of the details of an event. Reintroducing similar bodily cues may help us retrieve those memories, even decades later.”

Senior author Professor Jane Aspell, who leads the Self & Body Lab at Anglia Ruskin University, said, “When our childhood memories were formed, we had a different body. So we wondered: if we could help people experience aspects of that body again, could we help them recall their memories from that time?

“Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories.

“These results are really exciting and suggest that further, more sophisticated body illusions could be used to unlock memories from different stages of our lives—perhaps even from early infancy. In the future, it may even be possible to adapt the illusion to create interventions that might aid memory recall in people with memory impairments.”