Voluntary Control of Body Memories and its Neural Signature

Description

Abstract (English)

Everyday bodily experiences form powerful memory traces that influence our behaviour and mental wellbeing. Yet, whether and how body memory traces can be voluntarily controlled remains understudied. Using body touch as a model system, we developed a paradigm in which participants first experienced different tactile sensations at different body parts while viewing paired visual scenes in the MR scanner. After learning, they either actively retrieved or suppressed the associated body memories when re-exposed to the scenes. When later asked to recall their memories, participants demonstrated significantly higher accuracy in previously enhanced compared to previously suppressed trials. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex served as the control hub for bidirectional body memory modulation, with supplementary motor area, inferior parietal cortex, precuneus and insular cortex as domain-specific targets. Sensorimotor cortices, including primary somatosensory and motor cortices, mediated the recall of previously enhanced items, reflecting topographic details of the original experience. Right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) drove suppression-induced forgetting of bodily experiences, with right insular cortex as a significant mediator between vlPFC activation and individual differences in suppression success. Perirhinal cortex (PC) and hippocampal subfield CA1 were recruited both during enhancement and suppression trials, with PC emerging as a gatekeeper for the integration of body memories into the hippocampus. Together these findings demonstrate that body memories can be voluntarily modulated directly after their experience, and identify a body memory control network as a novel therapeutic target for conditions characterised by dysbalanced body memories such as somatic symptoms or post-traumatic stress disorder.