Khintchine's theorem is a classical result from metric number theory which relates the Lebesgue measure of certain limsup sets with the divergence of naturally occurring volume sums. Importantly this result provides a quantitative description of how the rationals are distributed within the reals. In this talk I will discuss some recent work where I prove that a similar Khintchine like phenomenon occurs typically within many families of overlapping iterated function systems. Families of iterated function systems these results apply to include those arising from Bernoulli convolutions, the {0,1,3} problem, and affine contractions with varying translation parameter.

Time permitting I will discuss a particular family of iterated function systems for which we can be more precise. Our analysis of this family shows that by studying the metric properties of limsup sets, we can distinguish between the overlapping behaviour of iterated function systems in a way that is not available to us by simply studying properties of self-similar measures.