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Poster C152 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Origin and Control of Persistent Mental Content
Gabriel Kressin Palacios1 (), Buddhika Bellana2, Christopher J. Honey1; 1Johns Hopkins University, 2York University
We often find that concepts or memories, especially regarding situations or social interactions, become “stuck in our heads”. Such persisting content shapes our mental context and thereby our thoughts and actions. Yet, we know little about the cognitive and memory processes involved in the persistence of mental content. Do persisting thoughts depend on information maintained in working memory? To investigate this, we used a narrative reading paradigm which induces persisting thoughts. The rate of unwanted thoughts decreased over the minutes following the narrative, largely robust to changes in interfering material. Thus, the persisting content was not stored in a capacity-limited working memory system. Additionally, participants were able to reduce, but not eliminate unwanted thoughts using volitional suppression. Altogether the experience of persisting thoughts appears to rely on non-volitional retrieval from a passive memory trace.
Keywords: persist thought narrative thought