Heather Iriye

I am an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience based in the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. My work investigates the neural processes that lead to a unified sense of body ownership and how they support memory for past events. 

Every time we recall a personal event or episode, we remember our conscious selves in the event or episode. And every event we experience in our daily life that results in a memory being created involves experiencing our conscious self in the centre of the event. The spatial and perceptual experience of one’s own body is the most basic form of conscious self-experience, and this bodily-self defines the ego-centric spatial reference frame that is crucial for the processing of sensory and cognitive information. My research uses a combination of virtual reality and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand how the fundamental feeling that our body belongs to us (i.e., body ownership) influences the formation and retrieval of lifelike events.

I teach the "Association Cortex and Language" module as part of the Neuroscience course in the MSc Biomedicine programme.