psychology

Peer 5

People’s Spontaneous Thoughts Can Be Influenced by Deep Processing

In common, people’s thoughts are always dependent on history by the behavior we did or things we

met. However, the phenomenon (reading stories is seemed to linger our mind longer than other

things) made some researchers (Bellana et al.) think about the relationship between deep

processing and our current thoughts. They hypothesized that “the stream of our thinking is especially

affected by ‘deeper’ forms of processing, emphasizing the meaning and implication of a stimulus

rather than its immediate physical properties of low-level semantics”. Situation-level meaning can be

an example of “’deeper’ forms of processing”. Therefore, lingering can be triggered by both of

properties of stimulus and people’s orientation.(1)

In order to confirm their hypothesis, they began testing if deep processing does shape our

spontaneous thoughts the most compared to relative shallow processing. They built up an

experiment, where different tasks (intact story, word scrambled and sentence scrambled) were IV

(independent variables) and the theme similarity calculated by free association (participants had 5

minutes to type words in mind before and after reading) as well as consequence of story

comprehension questionnaire are DV (dependence variables). The place where participants read

and time to read should be the same (control variables). At the beginning of the experiment,

participants were divided into three groups: intact story group, word-scrambled story group and

sentence-scrambled group (make sure each group contained the same number of people). Then,

these participants experienced 2 free association in pre-story and post-story reading respectively.

Finally, some story-comprehension tests were provided for them to complete as well. Participants

read short simple stories to avoid influencing the result by the difficulty of understanding.(1)

The results of this experiment lead to 5 conclusions. First, scrambling can limit deep understanding

of the story discovered by transportation and multiple choice comprehension questions. In both of

the tests, people in intact condition performed the best compared to others to gain the highest

proportion in both. Second, Stories can trigger lasting influences on our current thoughts by

self-reported lingering. Participants in narrative coherence group reported the strongest sense of the

story. Third, stories can linger in our mind more and longer than sentence or words. Fourth,

transporting stories and deeply-processed words can last in our mind. Fifth, the themes of story are

undisciplined in post-story association. Therefore, the hypothesis of researchers are confirmed -

deep processing can deeply influence our spontaneous thoughts.(1)

According to the experiment above, the participants were not separated by age and from my

perspective, the age can also be a factor to influence our spontaneous thoughts after reading a

story. We can invite participants in all age and divide them into different ranges of ages: adolescents

(13-19), youngsters (20-39), middle-aged people (40-59), elderly people (60 or above) (IV). These

participants will perform the same steps as the experiment above and find out the theme similarity

and the consequence of comprehension to discover the difference between thoughts of various age

ranges after reading the same stories. People in different period of ages can learn diverse things

when reading the same story due to disparate experience they have met, which is the biggest

reason why I want to choose the age range to be a factor. Personally, the elderly people may have

more spontaneous thoughts when reading the story.

Reference

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

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