The Role of Autobiographical Memory in Empathy: A Perspective from Memory Disorders

Empathy, the capacity to understand and share others' emotions, relies on two complementary components: cognitive empathy, involving perspective-taking and inferential understanding, and affective empathy, grounded in bodily resonance with others' states. Both depend on the ability to maintain a clear boundary between self and other because, when this is blurred, individuals might experience emotional contagion, a simpler form of emotional engagement with the other. Evidence suggests that autobiographical memory supports cognitive empathy by enabling individuals to simulate others' experiences through recollection, while interoceptive processes contribute to affective empathy by providing access to internal bodily representations that are appraised and interpreted based on first-hand previous experiences. We propose that memory and empathy are interconnected through a shared mechanism of self-other distinction, primarily mediated by the precuneus and its interactions with hippocampus, anterior insula and cingulate cortex. Damage to these networks may differentially impair empathic components, depending on whether memory-based self-referential processes or bodily self-representations are compromised. We suggest that the weakening of self-other distinction may represent a key mechanism linking memory loss to empathy impoverishment. Future studies should explicitly investigate this relationship by integrating assessments of memory, interoception, and self-other distinction-using approaches such as virtual reality, lesion mapping, and neuromodulation-to clarify how memory deficits affect empathy. Understanding these processes may reconcile inconsistent findings in the literature and advance models of social cognition across aging and disease.