Why Can a New Place Suddenly Feel as Though We’ve Been There Before?

You enter a hotel corridor for the first time and suddenly feel certain that this exact moment has happened before, while also knowing that you have never been there. This conflict between familiarity and an assessment of novelty is usually called déjà vu.

One experimentally supported account places the experience within recognition memory. A signal of familiarity can arise even when we cannot retrieve the specific earlier event that produced it. The turns, furniture positions and openings in the hotel corridor may resemble the overall layout of a school corridor encountered years ago. The details differ and the older scene does not come to mind, so familiarity is attributed to the present scene. In virtual-scene experiments, people were more likely to report déjà vu when a new setting shared its spatial configuration with an earlier setting that they could not recall.

Déjà vu can also bring a subjective sense of knowing what will happen next. Researchers induced the experience during virtual tours and asked participants to predict the next turn. Participants felt more able to predict during déjà vu, but their actual accuracy did not improve accordingly. A feeling of certainty and predictive ability therefore need to be distinguished.

The central point is that déjà vu is not necessarily a complete old memory replaying. It may occur when familiarity, source retrieval and novelty assessment briefly fail to align. This account produces testable laboratory effects, but it is not established as the sole mechanism behind every experience. It also relies on subjective reports, and laboratory induction is not identical to spontaneous everyday déjà vu. The feeling is real, but it cannot by itself show that the event has happened before or that a premonition is accurate.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22322010/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29494276/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37979736/