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Andrews-Hanna et al. (2022).
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
, 151(3), 628–642.
Bellana et al (2022).
Nature Communications
, 13(1), Article 1.
De Deyne, S. et al. (2018).
Manuscript submitted for publication.
Gable et al. (2019).
Psychological Science
, 30(3), 396–404.
Gray et al. (2019).
American Psychologist
, 74(5), 539–554.
Honey etl al. (2023).
Directions in Psychological Science
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Klinger (1978).
The Stream of Consciousness: Scientific Investigations into the Flow of Human Experience
(pp. 225–258).
Paszke (2019).
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Pennington et al. (2014).
EMNLP 2014, pages 1532–1543, Doha, Qatar. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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REFERENCES
Measure Personal Concerns by directly eliciting them.
Why does mental content persist? Identify rational/normative
costs and benefits.
What neural mechanisms underlie persistence of content?
NEXT STEPS
Free association word chains reliably predict participants' creativity (Gray et al., 2019)
Post-story word chains provide an objective
correlate of the subjective experience of lingering
thoughts.
Narrative content persisted in spontaneous thought
for 5 minutes or more.
We did not find a link between pre-story free
associations and lingering thoughts or
persistent
narrative content.
CONCLUSIONS
* mean_wr_pre -> linger_rating
* theme influence
* pre (lstm) -> linger_rating prediction
* liwc -> linger_rating prediction
Current conclusion: not so easy!
Personal
Concerns
Narrative
Content
High
Lingering
High overlap
Personal
Concerns
Narrative
Content
Low
Lingering
Low Overlap
HYPOTHESIS
Theme influence: SWOWen
Pennebaker et al. (2015)
Wolf et al. (2020), Paszke et al. (2019)
LIWC
De Deyne et al. (2018)
Transformer / LSTM
w1
w2
w3
w4
e1
e2
e3
e4
e1.2
e2.2
e3.2
e4.2
e1.n
e2.n
e3.n
e4.n
Story-Relatedness
None of our methods using pre-story associates predicted the subjective
experience of lingering thought or persisting narrative content.
estimate overlap
to narrative content
Estimate Personal-
Concerns with pre-
story free associates.
(Andrews-Hanna et al. 2022)
ANALYSIS
EXPLAINING INDIVIDUAL
VARIABILITY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
−2
0
2
4
−2
0
2
4
−2
0
2
4
−2
0
2
4
−2
0
2
4
−2
0
2
4
first 10
last 10
0.0
0.5
0.0
0.5
0.0
0.5
0.0
0.5
0.0
0.5
0.0
0.5
Word Position
(5 min)
(0 min)
Change in Story-Relatedness (Post - Pre Cohen's D)
Story-Relatedness of Word Chains (Z-scored)
Subjective Lingering
WORD-
SCRAMBLED
ORIGINAL
SENTENCE-
SCRAMBLED
REPLICATION
SENTENCE-
SCRAMBLED
ORIGINAL
NEUTRAL CUE
ORIGINAL
INTACT
REPLICATION
INTACT
ORIGINAL
ORIGINAL
REPLICATION
ORIGINAL
REPLICATION
NEUTRAL CUE
REPLICATION
ORIGINAL
INTACT
SENTENCE-SCRAMBLED
WORD-SCRAMBLED
R
2
= .00
R
2
= .18
R
2
= .18
R
2
= .20
R
2
= .26
R
2
= .18
R
2
= .01
R
2
= .14
R
2
= .17
R
2
= .13
R
2
= .14
R
2
= .07
HUMAN RATINGS
GLOVE RATINGS
To what extent did the
text linger in your mind
after reading it?
1 (Not At All) to 7 (Very Much)
7
3
Subjective experience
of lingering thought
Objective measure
of mental content
SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE
MEASURES OF MENTAL PERSISTENCE
float
boat
swim
drown
water
dead
drowning
murder
wife
husband
killer
crime
robbery
rape
assualt
homicide
destroy
evidence
group
secret
found
river
bank
money
steal
robber
prison
justice
cereal
milk
man
announce
gravitas
encourage
administration
allow
disappear
pillow
pillow
pearls
5
10
15
20
5
10
15
20
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Word Position
Story−Relatedness
MEASURING MENTAL CONTENT
Pennington et al. (2014)
Reading
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
How related is the word
to a
specific moment
within the story?
Rating
Questions
Time
HUMAN RATINGS
GLOVE RATINGS
PARADIGM
Free
Association
5 Minutes
Self-paced
Reading
Text Manipulation
Free
Association
5 Minutes
Post-task
Questions
I. Theme word generation
II. Self-reported lingering
Time
Free Association
BODY
story-relevant cue
mind
participant-generated associate
MIND
associate becomes next cue
Time (5 Minutes)
INTACT
Original story order
WORD-
SCRAMBLED
Words in scrambled order,
working memory task
Sentences in scrambled order
SENTENCE-
SCRAMBLED
READING CONDITIONS
We hypothesize that content is more likely to linger if it resonates with participants'
personal concerns (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2021; Klinger, 1978).
Why do individuals differ in the mental persistence
of narrative content?
In Bellana et al. (2022) lingering biases were only detectable for about 2
minutes
following the story’s end. Subjective and anectdotal reports
indicate
narrative content persists longer.
For how long is narrative content detectable in
free-association word chains?
Is the subjective experience of lingering thoughts
reflected in free-association word chains?
Past experiences shape our current thoughts, actions, and decisions. But
which experiences resonate in mind and for how long? Persisting thoughts
enable us to find creative solutions to problems (Gable et al., 2019) and are
associated with
depression and anxiety (Spinhoven et al., 2018). We
recently introduced a
paradigm characterizing what content
lingers
in
spontaneous
thought after participants read a story (Bellana et
al. 2022).
INTRODUCTION
HOW ARE LINGERING THOUGHTS MODULATED BY TIME
AND PERSONAL CONCERNS?
Gabriel Kressin Palacios
1
, Buddhika Bellana
2
& Christopher J. Honey
1
1
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University;
2
Department of Psychology, Glendon Campus, York University
5
We thank Dr. Jeff Bowen for statistical consultation.