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Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought

Some experiences linger in mind, spontaneously returning to our thoughts for minutes after their conclusion. Other experiences fall out of mind immediately. It remains unclear why. We hypothesize that an input is more likely to persist in our thoughts when it has been deeply processed: when we have...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bellana, Buddhika, Mahabal, Abhijit, Honey, Christopher J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9357042/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35933422
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32113-6
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author Bellana, Buddhika
Mahabal, Abhijit
Honey, Christopher J.
author_facet Bellana, Buddhika
Mahabal, Abhijit
Honey, Christopher J.
author_sort Bellana, Buddhika
collection PubMed
description Some experiences linger in mind, spontaneously returning to our thoughts for minutes after their conclusion. Other experiences fall out of mind immediately. It remains unclear why. We hypothesize that an input is more likely to persist in our thoughts when it has been deeply processed: when we have extracted its situational meaning rather than its physical properties or low-level semantics. Here, participants read sequences of words with different levels of coherence (word-, sentence-, or narrative-level). We probe participants’ spontaneous thoughts via free word association, before and after reading. By measuring lingering subjectively (via self-report) and objectively (via changes in free association content), we find that information lingers when it is coherent at the narrative level. Furthermore, and an individual’s feeling of transportation into reading material predicts lingering better than the material’s objective coherence. Thus, our thoughts in the present moment echo prior experiences that have been incorporated into deeper, narrative forms of thinking.
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spelling pubmed-93570422022-08-08 Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought Bellana, Buddhika Mahabal, Abhijit Honey, Christopher J. Nat Commun Article Some experiences linger in mind, spontaneously returning to our thoughts for minutes after their conclusion. Other experiences fall out of mind immediately. It remains unclear why. We hypothesize that an input is more likely to persist in our thoughts when it has been deeply processed: when we have extracted its situational meaning rather than its physical properties or low-level semantics. Here, participants read sequences of words with different levels of coherence (word-, sentence-, or narrative-level). We probe participants’ spontaneous thoughts via free word association, before and after reading. By measuring lingering subjectively (via self-report) and objectively (via changes in free association content), we find that information lingers when it is coherent at the narrative level. Furthermore, and an individual’s feeling of transportation into reading material predicts lingering better than the material’s objective coherence. Thus, our thoughts in the present moment echo prior experiences that have been incorporated into deeper, narrative forms of thinking. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-08-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9357042/ /pubmed/35933422 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32113-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Bellana, Buddhika
Mahabal, Abhijit
Honey, Christopher J.
Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
title Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
title_full Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
title_fullStr Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
title_full_unstemmed Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
title_short Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
title_sort narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9357042/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35933422
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32113-6
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