Brain Mechanisms Underlying the Subjective Experience of Remembering

Abstract

The ability to remember events in vivid, multisensory detail is a significant part of human experience, allowing us to relive previous encounters and providing us with the store of memories that shape our identity. Recent research has sought to understand the subjective experience of remembering, that is, what it feels like to have a memory. Such remembering involves reactivating sensory-perceptual features of an event and the thoughts and feelings we had when the event occurred, integrating them into a conscious first-person experience. It allows us to reflect on the content of our memories and to understand and make judgments about them, such as distinguishing events that actually occurred from those we might have imagined or been told about. In this review, we consider recent evidence from functional neuroimaging in healthy participants and studies of neurological and psychiatric conditions, which is shedding new light on how we subjectively experience remembering. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Episodic Memory Precision and Reality Monitoring Following Stimulation of Angular Gyrus

“…Turning to the possible neurocognitive basis of memory precision and reality monitoring, stimulation of angular gyrus selectively reduced the observed link between memory precision and self-referential reality monitoring decisions, consistent with proposals that functioning of angular gyrus may contribute to the self-referential quality of memories (Bonnici et al, 2018;Rugg & King, 2018;Weniger et al, 2009;Yazar et al, 2012Yazar et al, , 2014Yazar et al, , 2017. This self-referential mnemonic function may involve integrating multiple modalities of retrieved features, such as visual and auditory details (Yazar et al, 2017), within an egocentric, first-person perspective framework (Bonnici et al, 2018), in order to reconstruct rich and subjectively vivid mnemonic representations that give rise to a sense of self-agency (Simons et al, 2022;Zou & Kwok, 2021).…”

“…Thus, it appears that angular gyrus does not play a role in reinstating perceptual aspects of an event per se, explaining its relative insensitivity to the imagined/perceived manipulation in the present data. Instead, the evidence indicates that angular gyrus supports the integration of multimodal memory features within a self-referential framework, producing the kind of first-person perspective representation that enables the subjective re-experiencing of past events (Simons et al, 2022).…”

“…The rememberer may then evaluate whether this self-referential representation resembles the characteristics often expected of personal memories, enabling the reality monitoring decision making that is thought to be supported by functioning of anterior medial prefrontal cortex (Simons et al, 2017). Although angular gyrus and anterior medial prefrontal cortex may support episodic memory precision and self-referential reality monitoring decision making, respectively, it is likely to be through their interaction that a holistic subjective experience of remembering may arise (Simons et al, 2022). This ability to project rememberers themselves into subjective mental experiences characterises the 'autonoetic consciousness' that defines episodic memory (Tulving, 1985).…”

“…For example, memories full of vivid visuoperceptual detail might be more likely to be real than those primarily comprising internally generated thoughts (Johnson et al, 1988). One prediction of this framework is that reality monitoring ability may depend, at least in part, on the precision with which details of past experiences are remembered (Simons et al, 2022;Simons et al, 2017). If, for example, a memory is relatively vague and imprecise, the rememberer may struggle to distinguish whether it relates to an event that actually occurred, or one that might have been imagined.…”

Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments

“…Crucially, however, the system itself is also such an observer [ 185 ] and generates models of spaces to help guide activity. In humans, the personal past is such a space, as increasingly more detailed studies of the construction of episodic memories demonstrate [ 186 , 187 ]. A very fundamental way for even simple observers to generate the notion of spaces ab initio is from the commonalities between actions required to nullify changes in sensory experience.…”