Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Linking Targeted, Spontaneous Thoughts to Verbal Labels: Implications for Clinical Interventions

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ariel Huh¹, Ezequiel Morsella^1,2, Sarah Brauer¹; ¹San Francisco State University, ²University of California, San Francisco

Can a stimulus activate more than one mental association in the stream of consciousness? Can spontaneous thoughts activate such associations systematically? To address these questions, in a task that will be amenable to neuroimaging, we will first train participants (n > 45) to associate a nonsense word with a nonsense shape and with a nonsense sound (a nonstandard chord). The order of presentation of the shape training and the chord training will be counterbalanced across participants. Afterward, participants will be instructed to think of the nonsense word (the “lead associate”) whenever they experience, in response to external stimuli, a certain type of autobiographical memory (one having a “family/recreational” context). Half of the eighty stimuli will be line drawings of objects that are associated with a “family/recreational” context, and the other half of the stimuli will be associated with an “academic/professional” context. Stimuli will be presented one at a time, in random order. We will also measure, on a trial-by-trial basis, whether the participant happened to think of the shape and chord. Our task, which may illuminate the limits of the mental associations that can be activated by a stimulus, will be designed to be amenable to neuroimaging technologies that can identify the neural correlates of the different kinds of mental associations (e.g., visual-based representations versus auditory-based representations). Our research has implications for interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, in which clients must monitor, and respond mentally in some way to, (e.g., “reframing”) the occurrence of certain spontaneous thoughts (e.g., ruminations).

Topic Area: THINKING: Other