Heather Iriye

Heather Iriye

Assistant Professor
Visiting address: Solnavägen 9 - kvarter D4, 17165 Solna
Postal address: C4 Neurovetenskap, C4 Forskning Ehrsson, 171 77 Stockholm

About me

  • 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. 

Research

  • 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.

Teaching

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

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2024 - 31 December 2026
    Memories of personal past events affect not only how we recall the past, but how we interpret the present and behave in the future. These memories are by nature highly embodied. During retrieval, the sensory, motor, and affective components of the original event are vividly re-experienced with one´s sense of self bound in the centre. But how do our bodies influence the way we turn fleeting experiences into lasting memories? An exciting new line of research directed at understanding the influence of the body on memory for events indicates that experiencing ownership over a body from a first-person perspective enhances subjective (i.e. memory vividness) and objective (i.e. accuracy) aspects of retrieval (Iriye & Ehrsson, 2022). Transferring one´s sense of bodily ownership and self-location to a postiion outside of one´s physical body at encoding disrupts functioning of the hippocampus at retrieval, a critical hub of episodic memory (Bergouignan et al., 2014). Yet, we do not know how the manipulation of bodily selfhood  affects neural activity during encoding, and how it later relates to activity at retrieval. Further, if disrupted bodily selfhood impairs memory accuracy and hippocampal functioning, will it also render memories more suscepible to distortion?´Body in Memory ´ will combine cutting-edge virtual reality with functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate the critical role our bodies play in preserving our ability to vividly relive the past.

Employments

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 2024-2028
  • Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 2021-2024

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