A new study has found that people can better access detailed memories from their childhood by experiencing an illusion of owning a younger version of their own face. The research, published in Scientific Reports, suggests a profound link between how we perceive our bodies and our ability to recall events from our personal history. This finding is the first to show that temporarily changing one’s sense of bodily self can facilitate the retrieval of remote memories.

The investigation was led by a team of neuroscientists at Anglia Ruskin University who were exploring the connection between the self, the body, and autobiographical memory. Our memories are not just recordings of external events; they are experiences that happened to us while we inhabited a particular body. The researchers reasoned that since our bodies change throughout our lives, the physical self we had in childhood is different from the one we have as adults.

“When our childhood memories were formed, we had a different body,” said senior author Jane Aspell, who leads the Self & Body Lab at Anglia Ruskin University. “So we wondered: if we could help people experience aspects of that body again, could we help them recall their memories from that time?” This question formed the basis for their experiment, which sought to see if reintroducing body-related cues from the past could help reactivate memories associated with that period.

To test this idea, the researchers recruited 50 healthy adults for an online experiment. Participants were randomly split into two groups. In the experimental group, individuals viewed a live video of their own face that had been digitally altered with a filter to look like a childlike version of themselves. The control group viewed a live, unaltered video of their adult faces.

The scientists then induced what is known as an “enfacement illusion.” Participants were instructed to move their heads in time with a metronome. For both groups, the face on the screen would mirror their movements, creating a powerful sensation that the face they were seeing was their own, similar to looking in a mirror. This synchronous movement was designed to create a strong feeling of ownership over the on-screen face.

To test the strength of the illusion, the experiment also included a condition with asynchronous movement. In this part, the face on the screen moved in the opposite direction to the participant’s head movements, which tends to weaken the feeling of ownership. After each session of head movements, participants answered a questionnaire to measure how strongly they felt that the face on the screen was their own.

Immediately following the illusion, participants engaged in an autobiographical memory interview. While still viewing either their childlike or adult face, they were asked to recall specific events from two different time periods: their childhood (up to age 11) and the past year. The researchers provided cues like “home” or “holiday” to prompt the memories.

The study’s primary interest was not just whether people could remember events, but the richness of those memories. The interviews were recorded and scored based on the level of detail provided. Specifically, the researchers distinguished between two types of memory.

One is semantic memory, which involves factual information, like the name of a place you visited. The other is episodic memory, which involves the ability to mentally re-experience an event, recalling sensory details, emotions, and the feeling of being there. This is often described as a form of mental “time travel.”

The results showed a clear difference between the two groups. Participants who experienced the illusion with their childlike face recalled significantly more episodic details about their childhood memories compared to the control group who saw their adult faces. This effect was specific to childhood memories; the illusion had no impact on the recall of recent events from the past year. It also did not affect the recall of semantic, or factual, details about childhood.

Lead author Utkarsh Gupta, who conducted the study as part of his PhD, explained the potential mechanism behind the results. “All the events that we remember are not just experiences of the external world, but are also experiences of our body, which is always present,” he said. “We discovered that temporary changes to the bodily self, specifically, embodying a childlike version of one’s own face, can significantly enhance access to childhood memories.”

He added, “This might be because the brain encodes bodily information as part of the details of an event. Reintroducing similar bodily cues may help us retrieve those memories, even decades later.”

The researchers noted some limitations and areas for future exploration. The strength of the illusion, whether induced by synchronous or asynchronous movement, did not appear to affect the amount of memory detail recalled. This may suggest that simply viewing and identifying with the childlike face was enough to trigger the memory enhancement, a phenomenon that could be related to priming. Future studies could directly compare the embodiment illusion with a simpler priming condition, such as just looking at a static picture of a young face, to separate these effects.

Another limitation was that the digital filter was a generic approximation of a younger face, not a personalized rendering based on participants’ actual childhood photos. Future experiments in a lab setting could use more advanced technology to create more realistic and personalized younger selves, possibly strengthening the effect. Researchers also suggest that modifying the protocol to administer the illusion questionnaire after the memory interview could help avoid biasing participants’ responses.

Despite these limitations, the findings open up new possibilities for understanding memory. They suggest that the self is not a single, static entity but is fluid, and that our memories are deeply intertwined with our physical form at the time they were made.

“These results are really exciting and suggest that further, more sophisticated body illusions could be used to unlock memories from different stages of our lives – perhaps even from early infancy,” said Aspell. She suggested that in the future, it might be possible to adapt these techniques “to create interventions that might aid memory recall in people with memory impairments.”

The study, “Illusory ownership of one’s younger face facilitates access to childhood episodic autobiographical memories,” was authored by Utkarsh Gupta, Peter Bright, Waheeb Zafar, Pilar Recarte-Perez, Alex Clarke, and Jane E. Aspell.