An embodied perspective: angular gyrus and precuneus decode selfhood in memories of naturalistic events

While memory encoding is often assumed to occur from an in-body (first-person) perspective, out-of-body experiences demonstrate that we can form memories from a third-person perspective. This phenomenon offers a unique opportunity to investigate how embodiment interacts with visual perspective during encoding to shape how past events are recalled. Participants formed memories for naturalistic events following a manipulation of their sense of embodiment from in-body and out-of-body perspectives and recalled them during functional scanning. Region of interest multivariate analyses examined how the angular gyrus, precuneus, and hippocampus reflected visual perspective, embodiment, and their interaction during remembering. Patterns of activity during retrieval in the left angular gyrus and bilateral precuneus predicted the combination of embodiment and visual perspective, and embodiment on its own separated from visual perspective. Decoding accuracy was not significant for any region when predicting visual perspective alone. Our results suggest that the involvement of posterior parietal regions in establishing visual perspectives within memories cannot be disentangled from embodiment. Encoding events from an embodied in-body perspective led to higher memory accuracy following repeated retrieval. These results elucidate how fundamental feelings of being located within and experiencing the world from the perspective of one’s own body are integrated within memory.