Fig. 6: Lingering following a list of words.
A Histograms revealed participants’ self-reported lingering increased with deeper processing of a non-narrative stimulus (a word-list). Participants provided their rating on a 7-pt scale: 7 = very much, 1 = not at all. Black dashed line represents the mean rating per condition. n = 80 participants per condition. B Results of document classification, however, show no evidence of a detectable change in words used in pre- vs. post-task free association. Classifiers were trained within-condition per experiment (n = 80 participants), using a leave-one-participant-out cross-validation procedure with 500 bootstraps. Solid line represents the mean classification accuracy. Null distributions are plotted in gray. The exact accuracies and p-values for each of the one-tailed permutation tests is as follows: Story [57% accuracy, p = 0.056]; Theme [54% accuracy, p = 0.176]; Tangible [56% accuracy, p = 0.072]; Italic [44% accuracy, p = 0.842]. C Bias in free association content from pre- to post-task is plotted for each condition. Bias was defined as the proportion of post-task free association chains that contained a given word [p(Post)] minus the proportion of pre-task free association chains containing the same word [p(Pre)]. p(Post) and p(Pre) were both based on the total of 80 free association chains per condition. For legibility, only free associates that occurred in at least 16% of free association chains or showed a 10% bias for pre- or post-task are displayed. Size of points represents a given word’s p(Pre). D Theme similarity pre- and post-task highlights some evidence for an increase in similarity to list themes after deeply processing the word list. Grey lines show the change in theme similarity within-participant. Group means are displayed using black circles. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. n = 80 participants per condition. For display purposes, significance was estimated with uncorrected two-sided paired-sample t-tests comparing pre- vs. post-task theme similarity [ns p > 0.05; * p =< 0.05; ** p = <0.01, *** p = <0.001, **** p = <0.0001]. For additional details regarding paired t-tests, see Supplementary Note XVI. Source data for all panels are provided as a Source Data file.
