Premotor-hippocampal connectivity at encoding links the sense of self in the past and present

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

Autonoetic consciousness (ANC), the ability to re-experience a personal past event is at the crossroad between episodic memory and self-consciousness in the act of remembering (Klein and Nichols, 2012; Tulving, 1985). Bodily self-consciousness (BSC), defined as a unitary sense of self within the bodily boundaries, arises from multisensory and sensorimotor perceptual mechanisms of specific bodily signals (Blanke et al., 2015), and has been argued to be the missing link joining self-conscious sensorimotor context during encoding with later conscious re-living of the encoded event (ANC,Bergouignan, 2021; Gauthier et al., 2020;Iriye and Ehrsson, 2022; Meyer et al., 2024). However, how BSC and its related subjective experience at encoding affect ANC at the neural level remains unknown. In this study, we addressed this question by modulating sensorimotor context and its related BSC (through sense of agency -SoA-, and sense of body ownership - SoO) during the encoding of virtual scenes while simultaneously recording brain activity using fMRI at encoding.