Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Department of Psychology, Glendon Campus, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Nat Commun. 2022 Aug 6;13(1):4585. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32113-6.
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.
有些体验会在我们的脑海中挥之不去，在结束后几分钟内自发地回到我们的思绪中。其他的体验则会立即从脑海中消失。目前还不清楚原因。我们假设，当输入被深度处理时，它更有可能在我们的思维中持续存在：当我们提取其情境意义而不是其物理属性或低级语义时。在这里，参与者阅读具有不同连贯性水平（词、句或叙事水平）的单词序列。在阅读前后，我们通过自由联想来探测参与者的自发思维。通过主观测量（通过自我报告）和客观测量（通过自由联想内容的变化），我们发现当信息在叙事层面上连贯时，信息会持续存在。此外，个体在阅读材料中的沉浸感预测比材料的客观连贯性更好地预测信息的持续存在。因此，我们现在的想法反映了之前被纳入更深入、叙事形式思维的经验。
