Investigating the appraisal structure of spontaneous thoughts: evidence for differences among unexpected thought, involuntary autobiographical memories, and ruminative thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Involuntary thinking occurs when mental states arise without intention. Such thoughts can take different forms, such as involuntary autobiographical memories (IAM), ruminative thoughts, and unexpected thoughts-all of which are popular areas of study, albeit in somewhat disparate literatures. Despite these mental states sharing a common thread of feeling involuntary in nature, it is nevertheless unclear what separates them phenomenologically. We conducted a set of exploratory and confirmatory experiments to elucidate the appraisal dimensions behind these forms of involuntary thought, with a particular interest in understanding the phenomenology behind unexpected thoughts that are predicted to violate expectations of both timing and content. Across two experiments, we found that unexpected thoughts had unique appraisal structures compared to the other two forms of involuntary thought: they were less identifiably cued, more surprising in content and timing, and offered new information (i.e., insight). We discuss how these distinctions support recent theories regarding the nature of unexpected thought and its relation to other forms of involuntary thinking, namely IAM and ruminative thought, which are the more commonly studied forms of involuntary thinking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".