Origin and Control of Persistent Mental Content

Some thoughts and experiences persist in our minds on the scale of minutes. For example, topics discussed earlier in a conversation remain fresh in mind and may persist in our thinking after the conversation is over. What cognitive mechanisms underlie this persistent mental content and how can it be controlled? To answer these questions, we induced persistent mental content using immersive narrative stimuli and measured the rate and influence of persistent thoughts.First, we found that persistent mental content was spontaneous and not merely a consequence of intentional memory retrieval. Second, we found that persistent content was robust to interference from multiple types of similar and dissimilar distractor tasks. Finally, we found that when new information was construed as related to the preceding experience, the persistence of the preceding experience was prolonged. These data indicate that memory models need to be augmented with a slowly changing "deep context" representation which is robust to stimulus-driven interference and which biases both retrieval and the generation of the next thought.