Structure in the stream of consciousness: Evidence from a verbalized thought protocol and automated text analytic methods |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States;2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States;1. Univ Lyon, IFSTTAR, TS2, LESCOT, F-69675 Lyon, France;2. Laboratoire d''Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Université de Lyon, Bron, France;3. Université Paris-Est, COSYS, LEPSIS, IFSTTAR, F-77447 Marne-la-Vallée, France;4. Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France;1. Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, United States;2. Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States;3. Departments of Psychiatry and Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, United States;4. Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, United States;1. Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Harvard, MA, USA;2. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA;3. Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK;4. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada;5. Department of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;6. Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada;1. Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, United States;2. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands;3. Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, The Netherlands;4. Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, United States;5. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, United States;1. Institute for Psychology, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway;2. Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
| |
| Abstract: | A key question about the spontaneous stream of thought (SST), often called the stream of consciousness, concerns its serial structure: How are thoughts in an extended sequence related to each other? In this study, we used a verbalized thought protocol to investigate “clump-and-jump” structure in SST—clusters of related thoughts about a topic followed by a jump to a new topic, in a repeating pattern. Several lines of evidence convergently supported the presence of clump-and-jump structure: high interrater agreement in identifying jumps, corroboration of rater-assigned jumps by automated text analytic methods, identification of clumps and jumps by a data-driven algorithm, and the inferred presence of clumps and jumps in unverbalized SST. We also found evidence that jumps involve a discontinuous shift in which a new clump is only modestly related to the previous one. These results illuminate serial structure in SST and invite research into the processes that generate the clump-and-jump pattern. |
| |
| Keywords: | Spontaneous thought Stream of consciousness Mind wandering Thinking Text analytics Natural language processing |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
