Exploring self-generated thought during resting-state

National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)

PI：Prof. Chao-Gan Yan

The project aims to address the scientific issue of the identification of self-generated thought during resting-state. We have proposed a new behavioral paradigm to investigate the content characteristics of self-generated thought. We asked participants to speak their thoughts freely out loud during a typical “resting-state” condition, combined it with natural language processing to objectively and quantitatively detect thought divergence and sadness emotion tendency in thought content. our study has demonstrated that this new method is reliable and effective. Furthermore, we applied this method to resting-state fMRI and have collected data. Through this new method, it is hopeful for us to a comprehensive exploration of self-generated thought and spontaneous brain activity. These findings will have potential implications for understanding spontaneous brain activity.