Subjective reliving of past events is modulated by premotor–hippocampal coupling and bodily self-consciousness during event encoding

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Autonoetic consciousness (ANC) enables individuals to relive past events by recalling sensory and emotional details tied to a specific place and time related to a past event. Next to ample evidence linking ANC to memory-related mechanisms, recent behavioral evidence suggests that ANC is modulated by sensorimotor and multisensory bodily mechanisms that are fundamental for bodily self-consciousness (BSC). However, the neural mechanisms of how BSC modulates ANC remain unclear. Based on previous work showing that activity in dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC) and hippocampus indexes BSC effects and its related sense of agency (SoA) in episodic memory, we here explored whether functional connectivity between dPMC and hippocampus at encoding is related to later autonoetic reliving. Using virtual reality (VR), during the encoding of virtual scenes, we manipulated BSC by varying the level of visuomotor (feedback of participants' right-hand movements) and perspectival congruency (first-person versus third-person perspective), while recording brain activity, and collected ANC 1 week after encoding by established questionnaire procedures. Our results show that changes in functional connectivity strength between left hippocampus and left dPMC (contralateral to hand movements) were associated with different levels of visuomotor and perspectival congruency. Moreover, this connectivity modulated the relationship of SoA during encoding with later subjective ANC during reliving. Thus, higher connectivity was associated with a stronger SoA-ANC association, while lower connectivity led to a weaker association. Critically, this modulatory effect was absent for dPMC-hippocampus connectivity in the right hemisphere (i.e., ipsilateral to hand movements). These findings support the role of dPMC, a key SoA region, in ANC, linking subjective bodily experience during encoding to the subsequent subjective re-experiencing of past events.

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