Fig. 1: Think-aloud verbal responses.
From: Neural dynamics of spontaneous memory recall and future thinking in the continuous flow of thoughts
a Participants verbally described their spontaneous flow of thoughts for 10 min inside the MRI scanner. Their speeches were transcribed and manually segmented into individual thought units, with each thought unit containing a single topic and corresponding to one of the following categories: current state, semantic memory about the world or other people, semantic memory about oneself, episodic memory, imagining or planning the future, and other uncategorized thoughts. b Percentages of different thought categories among all thought units within each participant. Each colored dot represents an individual participant (N = 118 for all categories). Black circles indicate the mean across participants within each category. Error bars show the SEM across participants. c Temporal distribution of different thought categories within the 10-min think-aloud session. The upper panel shows the distribution of thought categories for five example participants. The lower panel shows the percentages of different thought categories averaged across participants for each time point (1 TR = 1.5-s window). Different colors denote different categories (current state = pink; semantic-world = green; semantic-self = light green; future-oriented = light blue; other = dark gray; fillers/pauses = light gray). d Word clouds showing common topics for each major thought category. Topic labels were generated by the annotators who segmented the think-aloud responses. Up to the 50 most frequent words used in topic labels, combined across all participants, are visualized using the WordCloud Python package (version 1.9.3). More frequent words are shown in larger fonts.
