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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Cognitive and Neural Origins of Persistent Experiences

Gabriel Arthur Daniel Kressin Palacios¹, Xian Li¹, Tianshu (Anya) Ouyang¹, Buddhika Bellana², Christopher Honey¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University, ²York University

Presenter: Gabriel Arthur Daniel Kressin Palacios

What cognitive and neural mechanisms cause us to think about recent experiences, even when we do not want to? We quantified the persistence of mental content by asking participants to generate word chains before and after reading an immersive story. Participants generated story-related words and reported lingering thoughts after reading. This effect was not eliminated by explicit instructions to suppress story-related thoughts, nor by distractor tasks that interfere with short-term memory. In a separate fMRI study, generating story-related words was associated with increased activity in regions linked to long-term memory retrieval. Thus, it appears that persistent mental content is generated by a form of spontaneous long-term memory retrieval. A key question remains: what is cuing these sometimes surprising or unwanted retrievals?

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures