psychology

Peer 2

As humans, our experiences stay with us for varied amounts of time, in varied degreed of vividness. These experiences, embedded in our memory, shape our view of the world and play an unconscious role of our future actions and desires. In the research paper, Narrative Thinking Lingers in Spontaneous Thought, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and York University sought after an explanation for why certain experiences are more memorable to us, and thus have a bigger impact on our lives, than others (Bellana, Mahabal, & Honey, 2021). They hypothesized that deeper forms of processing (meanings and semantics) have a greater effect on our thinking than shallow ways of processing (immediate physical properties). Two experiments were carried out. In their first study, 240 online participants read a short story: 80 read the short story intactly, 80 read the story with sentences scrambled, and 80 read the story with words scrambled. Before and after reading the story, participants had to perform a free association task, where they generated random words. It was found that after reading the story, those who read a more coherent version as well as those who tried to extract a meaning from the scrambled words and sentences, produced words that more aligned with its themes. This shows that those who had a deeper interaction with the story (i.e. reading for meaning rather than reading random words) had the story resonate with them for longer. The researchers also found that the stories had a more lasting influence on spontaneous thought for those who read more comprehensive versions, evident by the greater amount of time the story themes lingered in their randomly generated words. To quantify their data even more the researchers expanded their data collection to include a rewrite of the original story, as well as a new story. They also brought in a vector machine classifier to analyze the random word choices that the participants came up. The machine was able to correctly identify the before and after word lists of the participants who read the coherent stories with greater accuracy than the rewrite. In their second, much briefer study, participants were presented with a list of words that conveyed the general meaning of the original story. Some participants were asked to identify which words were italicized, which words were tangible, which words conveyed a theme and which words conveyed a story. In the end, it was found that the words had a greater lasting impact on those who had to process them with higher levels of thinking (which words had a theme, which words were more of a story). Throughout the two studies, it was concluded that events will have a greater lasting influence on those who cognitively interact with them more.

To extend this research further, I think that it would be beneficial to connect participants to an EEG machine as they read the short story, either intact or scrambled (Bellana, Mahabal, & Honey, 2021). Connecting participants to an EEG would allow us to see the parts of the brain that are related to comprehension. I predict that because the frontal lobe is responsible for reading fluency and grammatical usage, the scientists would be able to see how much of the frontal lobe is used, and to what intensity, as the three research groups carry out the experiment. I hypothesize that the participants who are told to try to come up with an underlying theme for scrambled words are going

to use the greatest amount of their frontal lobe, and the participants who are told to just read scrambled words are going to use the least amount of their frontal lobe. This experiment will shield light into the biological understanding of what is happening, and may show a correlation between how long an experience stays with us and intensity in which our frontal lobe is exercised. I would also keep the participants connected to an EEG as they complete the random word generating exercise before and after the reading to see how much of the hippocampus is active in each test group. This would be beneficial because it would allow researchers to correlate how much each participant's memory (conscious or subconscious) influences their future actions. I predict that those who were told to find an underlying theme in the scrambled groups or those who read for comprehension will have a greater part of their hippocampus activated as they complete the random word generating exercise at the end than those who were simply told to read random words and sentences.

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References

1. Bellana, B., Mahabal, A., & Honey, C. J. (2021). Narrative thinking lingers in spontaneous thought.