Are involuntary autobiographical memory and déjà vu natural products of memory retrieval?

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and deja vu are phenomena that occur spontaneously in daily life. IAMs are recollections of the personal past, whereas deja vu is defined as an experience in which the person feels familiarity at the same time as knowing that the familiarity is false. We present and discuss the idea that both IAMs and deja vu can be explained as natural phenomena resulting from memory processing and, importantly, are both based on the same memory retrieval processes. Briefly, we hypothesise that both can be described as "involuntary" or spontaneous cognitions, where IAMs deliver content and deja vu delivers only the feeling of retrieval. We map out the similarities and differences between the two, making a theoretical and neuroscientific account for their integration into models of memory retrieval and how the autobiographical memory literature can explain these quirks of daily life and unusual but meaningful phenomena. We explain the emergence of the deja vu phenomenon by relating it to well-known mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval, concluding that IAMs and deja vu lie on a continuum.