Structure in the stream of consciousness: Evidence from a verbalized thought protocol and automated text analytic methods.
Consciousness and cognition October 1, 2020 Chandra Sripada, Aman Taxali
The spontaneous stream of thought (SST), often called the stream of consciousness, exhibits a "clump-and-jump" structure: clusters of related thoughts about a topic followed by a jump to a new topic, in a repeating pattern. Multiple lines of evidence support this structure, including high interrater agreement in identifying jumps, corroboration by automated text analytic methods, identification by a data-driven algorithm, and inferred presence in unverbalized SST. Jumps involve a discontinuous shift where a new clump is only modestly related to the previous one. These results illuminate serial structure in SST and invite research into the processes generating the pattern.