Mentalizing and Episodic Memories (MEMES)

Walking a mile in somebody elses shoes, or predicting your own future footsteps, requires a process of mentalizing: you have to imagine what it is like to be another person (even if that other person is your future self). However, this is easier said than done mentalizing is a remarkably cognitively complex endeavor. But then why do most people seem to be able to mentalize with relative ease? One crucial, but as of yet mostly overlooked, answer to this question may lie in our ability to draw on our own past experiences (our episodic memories). Our ability to retrieve the past appears to draw on the same brain regions as our ability to take the perspective of another person (or our future selves). In other words, research increasingly hints that we may be able to walk a mile in another persons shoes (or predict our own footsteps) by remembering our past selves. However, while these findings are promising, they are as of yet circumstantial while both mentalizing and memory appear to revolve around the same brain regions, there has not been a systematic effort to bridge these two topics. There is therefore much that we do not yet know about the interplay between memories and mentalizing. A key reason for the limited integration between these topics is a lack of methodological tools capable of exploring the interplay between memory and mentalizing. To bridge this gap, we will develop a new set of experimental tools, which we will then use to conduct a series of online experiments and an in-person brain imaging experiment. After developing the novel empirical methods, we will investigate the interplay between memories and mentalizing with three main focus points. We will first explore the role of memories in mentalizing. From previous research we know that it is easier to take the perspective of a person with a similar background as ourselves (and harder to take the perspective of somebody with very different experiences). We will explore the cognitive mechanisms which support such similarity-based mentalizing. We then ask the inverse question: does taking another persons perspective enhance our ability to draw on our own past experiences? While this question may seem unintuitive at first, it is well- established that we can learn new behaviors by observing others and that such social learning is enhanced when we place ourselves in the other persons perspective. We will explore whether such social learning also enhances our ability to draw on our own experiences. Finally, we set out to deepen our understanding of the neural basis which support this interplay between memory and mentalizing. Early evidence suggests that both processes are part of a larger brain network (the default mode network). Learning about this interplay may therefore shed a new light on a wide range of brain functions.