ArticleNature communications2022
Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conversational content is organized across multiple timescales in the brain.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Article
- Semantic associative abilities and executive control functions predict novelty and appropriateness of idea generation.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Brain decoding of spontaneous thought: Predictive modeling of self-relevance and valence using personal narratives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Motivated Cognition in Cooperation.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Narrative Memories Woven by an Intertextual Hippocampus.Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics · 2024Article
- Recent advances in the neuroscience of spontaneous and off-task thought: implications for mental health.Nature. Mental health · 2023Article
- Psychological Momentum.Current directions in psychological science · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.