ABSTRACT
Much of the early research in deja vu was based on an individual differences approach using data collected from large-scale surveys. This work tended to amount to a natural history and definition of the experience rather than theory-driven research. This chapter presents the current state of the art in the individual differences approach, beginning by examining the effect of age on the frequency of deja vu experiences, and also considering other factors shown to commonly correlate with deja vu experience: such as the recall of dreams. The most recent studies to use this approach have correlated the frequency of deja vu with the size and connectivity of certain brain structures, an extremely promising development for better understanding deja vu. Deja vu could arise less in older adults because it is a complex metacognitive evaluation of a mismatch between two different kinds of information.
