Heather Iriye

Research

Heather’s 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. Her 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.

Sample Publications

Iriye, H., & St. Jacques, P. L. (2025). An embodied perspective: angular gyrus and precuneus decode selfhood in memories of naturalistic events. Imaging Neuroscience, 3, IMAG-a. PDF

Gisselsson, D., Pirnay, J. P., Wiederoder, M., Hart, C., Rinaldi, A., Gorgé, O., Iriye, H., Carvalho, L., Sedlackova, L., Voie, O., & Robinson, Y. (2025). Why the military should be interested in biomedical technology: four domains of innovation that could change fighting power. Biotechnology Advances, 108695. PDF

Iriye, H., Chancel, M., Ehrsson, H.H. (2023). Sense of own body shapes neural processes of memory encoding and reinstatement. Cerebral Cortex. 34(1), bhad443. PDF

Chancel, M., Iriye, H., & Ehrsson, H. H. (2022). Causal inference of body ownership in the posterior parietal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 42(37), 7131-7143. PDF

Iriye, H. & Ehrsson, H.H. (2022) Perceptual illusion of body-ownership within an immersive realistic environment enhances memory accuracy and re-experiencing, iScience, 25(1). PDF

Iriye, H. & St. Jacques, PL. (2021) Memories for third-person experiences in immersive virtual reality. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-14. PDF

Iriye, H. & St. Jacques, PL. (2020) How visual perspective influences the spatiotemporal dynamics of autobiographical memory retrieval. Cortex, 129, 464-475. PDF

Click here to listen to Heather Iriye on BBC Radio 4 Sideways — “Me, Myself, and Mine”, and here for her appearance on Medicinvetarna — “What is a thought?”.