Although central to well-being, functional and dysfunctional thoughts arise and unfold over time in ways that remain poorly understood. To shed light on these mechanisms, we adapted a “think aloud” paradigm to quantify the content and dynamics of individuals’ thoughts at rest. Across two studies, external raters hand coded the content of each thought and computed dynamic metrics spanning duration, transition probabilities between affective states, and conceptual similarity over time. Study 1 highlighted the paradigm’s high ecological validity and revealed a narrowing of conceptual scope following more negative content. Study 2 replicated Study 1’s findings and examined individual difference predictors of trait brooding, a maladaptive form of rumination. Across individuals, increased trait brooding was linked to thoughts rated as more negative, past-oriented and self-focused. Longer negative and shorter positive thoughts were also apparent as brooding increased, as well as a tendency to shift away from positive conceptual states, and a stronger narrowing of conceptual scope following negative thoughts. Importantly, content and dynamics explained independent variance, accounting for a third of the variance in brooding. These results uncover a real-time cognitive signature of rumination and highlight the predictive and ecological validity of the think aloud paradigm applied to resting state cognition.
How do thoughts arise, unfold, and change over time? Are the contents and dynamics of everyday thought rooted in conceptual associations within one’s semantic networks? To address these questions, we developed the Free Association Semantic task (FAST), whereby participants generate dynamic chains of conceptual associations in response to seed words that vary in valence. Ninety-four adults from a community sample completed the FAST task and additionally described and rated six of their most frequently occurring everyday thoughts. Text analysis and valence ratings revealed similarities in thematic and affective content between FAST concept chains and recurrent autobiographical thoughts. Dynamic analyses revealed that individuals higher in rumination were more strongly attracted to negative conceptual spaces and more likely to remain there longer. Overall, these findings provide quantitative evidence that conceptual associations may act as a semantic scaffold for more complex everyday thoughts, and that more negative and less dynamic conceptual associations in ruminative individuals mirror maladaptive repetitive thoughts in daily life.
Individual differences in human intelligence can be modeled and predicted from in vivo neurobiological connectivity. Many established modeling frameworks for predicting intelligence, however, discard higher-order information about individual differences in brain network topology, and show only moderate performance when generalized to make predictions in out-of-sample subjects. In this paper, we propose that connectome-based predictive modeling, a common predictive modeling framework for neuroscience data, can be productively modified to incorporate information about brain network topology and individual differences via the incorporation of bagged decision trees and the network based statistic. These modifications produce a novel predictive modeling framework that leverages individual differences in cortical tractography to generate accurate regression predictions of intelligence scores. Network topology-based feature selection provides for natively interpretable networks as input features, increasing the model's explainability. Investigating the proposed modeling framework's efficacy, we find that advanced connectome-based predictive modeling generates neuroscience predictions that account for a significantly greater proportion of variance in general intelligence scores than previously established methods, advancing our scientific understanding of the network architecture that underlies human intelligence.
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