The project was meant to establish the relation between empathy and memory that are two functions at the foundation of social cognition.
Although supporting the idea that memory interacts with empathy in building a representation of others’ inner states, clear-cut evidence of how, if so, this happens had never been shown. The project used state-of-the art computational technique applied to neuroimaging data and was critical to show the online reactivation of past memories in empathy.
The project comprised two studies, both using neuroimaging techniques, which could draw a complete picture of whether and how the brain engages autobiographical memory when empathizing.
The first study used the Electroencephalography (EEG), which is a neuroimaging technique that records non-invasively, the electrical activity spontaneously generated by the brain from electrodes safely placed on the scalp. This technique can show with infinitesimal temporal precision when information is processed in the brain. The recording was obtained while participants were performing two tasks. The first task was meant to induce an empathic reaction for physical pain as described by a simple sentence. The episodes described by the sentences could include scenes of participants’ autobiographical experience (collected in a pre-screening phase). Participants’ task was to provide an explicit judgement of their empathy awareness for an individual depicted in one of the episodes presented in the task. The fact that the episodes belonged or not to participants’ autobiographical experience was completely irrelevant to the task. If the autobiographical experience was reactivated during this task, that occurred spontaneously. The empathy task was followed by a second task, i.e. the memory task. In this task participants were cued to picture in their mind’s eye the scenes presented during the empathy task. Crucially, they were not explicitly asked to picture their own experience. Eventually, we applied state-of-the-art computational technique (i.e. supervised machine learning algorithm) that allows to distinguishing the EEG pattern associated to two conditions (in the present context the autobiographical and the non-autobiographical memories). This technique was applied transversely to the data acquired independently during the two tasks and we observed a consistency in the EEG pattern activities across the two tasks that showed the first direct evidence of the reactivation of the autobiographical memories in preparation of an explicit judgement of participants’ empathy awareness.
The second study used the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique (fMRI) that allowed to determining with infinitesimal spatial resolution the brain areas activated during the empathy task. This had the aim of collecting independent converging data that memory is engaged when empathizing.
The outcomes of the project showed that when an observer share past experience with a stranger, autobiographical memory gets reactivated when they have to explicitly rate their empathy awareness.
The results of MEMPATHY have been communicated in national and international conferences and meetings and disseminated at the Pint of Science 2018 in Birmingham. The twitter account of the fellow (@fede_meconi) posts constant updates of the project.
