Sense of agency during encoding predicts subjective reliving

Autonoetic consciousness (ANC), the ability to re-experience personal past events links episodic memory and self-consciousness by bridging awareness of oneself in a past event (i.e. during its encoding) with awareness of oneself in the present (i.e. during the reliving of a past event). Recent neuroscience research revealed a bodily form of self-consciousness, including the sense of agency (SoA) and the sense of body ownership (SoO) that are based on the integration of multisensory bodily inputs and motor signals. However, the relation between SoA and/or SoO with ANC is not known. Here, we used immersive virtual reality technology and motion tracking and investigated the potential association of SoA/SoO with ANC. For this we exposed participants to different levels of visuo-motor and perspectival congruency, known to modulate SoA and SoO, during the encoding of virtual scenes and collected ANC ratings one week after the encoding session. In a total of 74 healthy participants, we successfully induced systematic changes in SoA and SoO during encoding and found that ANC depended on the level of SoA experienced during encoding. Moreover, ANC was positively associated with SoA, but only for the scene encoded with preserved visuomotor and perspectival congruency and such SoA-ANC coupling was absent for SoO and control questions. Collectively, these data provide behavioral evidence in a novel paradigm that links a key subjective component of bodily self-consciousness during encoding, SoA, to the subjective reliving of those encoded events from one’s past, ANC. Significance statement We provide behavioral evidence showing that the sense of agency during the encoding of immersive virtual scenes as modulated by visuomotor and perspectival congruency modulates autonoetic consciousness, thereby linking a key component of the bodily self during encoding with the subjective reliving of the encoded events.