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Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind
Abstract
Mind wandering (i.e. engaging in cognitions unrelated to the current demands of the external environment) reflects the cyclic activity of two core processes: the capacity to disengage attention from perception (known as perceptual decoupling) and the ability to take explicit note of the current contents of consciousness (known as meta-awareness). Research on perceptual decoupling demonstrates that mental events that arise without any external precedent (known as stimulus independent thoughts) often interfere with the online processing of sensory information. Findings regarding meta-awareness reveal that the mind is only intermittently aware of engaging in mind wandering. These basic aspects of mind wandering are considered with respect to the activity of the default network, the role of executive processes, the contributions of meta-awareness and the functionality of mind wandering.
... A person may meander from topic to topic during an episode of mind-wandering; different mind-wandering episodes may also involve wholly different topics. Third, individuals are often unaware of their mind-wandering state [35] whereas repetitive negative thinking and thought intrusion are often associated with conscious appraisals and attempts to resist [36]. ...
... In contrast, various cases of hyperfocus seem to share certain similarities with those of mind-wandering. Mindwandering has been viewed as a state of "decoupled attention", which entails an inward shift of attention to one's thoughts and feelings and, as a result, an attenuation of sensory processing [12,35]. ...
... Current theories of mind-wandering consider perceptual decoupling, or reduced processing of immediate perceptual input, as a unique feature of mind-wandering [35,105]. Both behavioral and neurological evidence indicates that mind-wandering is associated with reduced processing of external information and events [35]. ...
People differ substantially in their vulnerability to distraction. Yet, many types of distractions exist, from external stimulation to internal thoughts. How should we characterize individual differences in their distractibility? Two samples of adult participants (total N = 1220) completed a large battery of questionnaires assessing different facets of real-world distractibility. Latent modeling revealed that these measures could be explained by three correlated-yet-distinct factors: external distraction, unwanted intrusive thoughts, and mind-wandering. Importantly, about 80% of the total variance in these three factors could be explained by a single higher-order factor ( d ) that could be construed in terms of a person’s general distractibility, and this general distractibility model was replicated across the two samples. We then applied the general distractibility model to understand the nature of ADHD symptomatology and hyperfocus (an intense state of long-lasting and highly focused attention). d was substantially associated with self-reported ADHD symptoms. Interestingly, d was also positively associated with hyperfocus, suggesting that hyperfocus may, to some degree, reflect attention problems. These results also show marked consistencies across the two samples. Overall, the study provides an important step toward a comprehensive understanding of individual differences in distractibility and related constructs.
... However, mind-wandering does not result in errors in all cases. Sometimes people can handle their primary tasks well when they start enjoying these periods of self-distraction as a temporary escape from the current situation (Schooler et al., 2011). This positive effect of mind-wandering is particularly common when the current task is associated with low cognitive load-in other words, it is a task in which performance can be achieved with little executive control involved (Randall et al., 2019) and therefore low performance is not a fool-proof indicator of mind-wandering. ...
... For example, researchers found that the pupil diameter in reaction to stimuli becomes smaller in an off-task state (Huijser et al., 2018), possibly related to a vigilance decrement that tends to co-occur with mind-wandering (Unsworth & Robison, 2016). On the level of the cerebral cortex, mind-wandering appears to be associated with inhibited sensory processing to the visual stimuli, referred to as 'perceptual decoupling' (Schooler et al., 2011). This perceptual decoupling manifests itself in the EEG as a reduced P1 and increased alpha power (frequency range 8.5 ~ 12Hz) observed at the parietal-occipital regions (Compton et al., 2019;Jin et al., 2019;Kam & Handy, 2013). ...
... In fMRI studies, mind-wandering is associated with increased activation of the default mode network (DMN), together with changes in the connectivity between the DMN and other networks (Christoff et al., 2009;Ho et al., 2019). Through indicating a memory retrieval process, the involvement of the DMN supports the functional role of mind-wandering as "spontaneous future cognition" (Cole & Kvavilashvili, 2019), potentially aiding problem-solving and creativity (Schooler et al., 2011). ...
Objective: Mind-wandering is a mental phenomenon where the internal thought process disengages from the external environment periodically. In the current study, we trained EEG classifiers using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to track mind-wandering across studies.
Approach: We transformed the input from raw EEG to band-frequency information (power), single-trial ERP (stERP) patterns, and connectivity matrices between channels (based on inter-site phase clustering, ISPC). We trained CNN models for each input type from each EEG channel as the input model for the meta-learner. To verify the generalizability, we used leave-N-participant-out cross-validations (N=6) and tested the meta-learner on the data from an independent study for across-study predictions.
Main results: The current results show limited generalizability across participants and tasks. Nevertheless, our meta-learner trained with the stERPs performed the best among the state-of-the-art neural networks. The mapping of each input model to the output of the meta-learner indicates the importance of each EEG channel.
Significance: Our study makes the first attempt to train study-independent mind-wandering classifiers. The results indicate that this remains challenging. The stacking neural network design we used allows an easy inspection of channel importance and feature maps.
... However, eye movements can also reflect internal processes, and properties related to the eyes (e.g., saccade rate, pupil size) have been widely used to index global brain states (e.g., arousal, motivation and cognitive effort) [23,24]. Further to this, during perceptually decoupled states of attention-states such as mind wandering-external information processing can become deprioritised and eye movement behaviours no longer serve an information processing function but are instead driven by internal states [25,26]. So the quiet eye fixation is not necessarily a direct indicator of information processing priorities, as is often assumed. ...
... Fixating the ball might help maintain a representation of the ball's spatial position relative to the performer, even if no additional visual information is required or available. Alternatively, maintaining a still fixation has been proposed as a strategy to actively avoid processing unnecessary and disruptive external information when performing purely internal tasks [25,30]. This suggestion is similar to the inhibition hypothesis of quiet eye [13,75] which proposes that by adopting a stabilizing gaze on one task-relevant cue, movements can be more effectively synchronised and one movement plan can be selected, while alternatives are inhibited. ...
The final fixation to a target in far-aiming tasks, known as the quiet eye , has been consistently identified as an important perceptual-cognitive variable for task execution. Yet, despite a number of proposed mechanisms it remains unclear whether the fixation itself is driving performance effects or is simply an emergent property of underpinning cognitions. Across two pre-registered studies, novice golfers ( n = 127) completed a series of golf putts in a virtual reality simulation to examine the function of the quiet eye in the absence of visual information. In experiment 1 participants maintained a quiet eye fixation even when all visual information was occluded. Visual occlusion did significantly disrupt motor skill accuracy, but the effect was relatively small (89cm vs 105cm radial error, std. beta = 0.25). In experiment 2, a ‘noisy eye’ was induced using covertly moving fixation points, which disrupted skill execution ( p = .04, BF = 318.07, std. beta = -0.25) even though visual input was equivalent across conditions. Overall, the results showed that performers persist with a long pre-shot fixation even in the absence of visual information, and that the stillness of this fixation confers a functional benefit that is not merely related to improved information extraction.
... (Mason et al., 2007;Smallwood &Schooler,2006) . Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) Mooneyham and Schooler (2013) Baird, Smallwood and Schooler (2010) (Mooneyham & Schooler, 2013) ( Baird, Smallwood, & Schooler, 2011) ( Gable, Hopper, & Schooler, 2019Schooler et al., 2011 .) Sio and Ormerod (2009 ...
... (Mason et al., 2007;Smallwood &Schooler,2006) . Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) Mooneyham and Schooler (2013) Baird, Smallwood and Schooler (2010) (Mooneyham & Schooler, 2013) ( Baird, Smallwood, & Schooler, 2011) ( Gable, Hopper, & Schooler, 2019Schooler et al., 2011 .) Sio and Ormerod (2009 ...
... Conscious experiences are typically associated with metaawareness when, at a given time, we exercise the ability to take explicit note of the current contents of our thoughts (Dunne et al., 2019;Schooler et al., 2011). However, there are moments when our thoughts seem to be empty, or their content is not accessible. ...
... Additionally, Ward and Wegner investigated the relationship between mind blanking and meta-awareness. Existing research indicates that self-reported and probecaught accounts of mental states can be used to assess the relationship between a particular mental state and meta-awareness (Schooler et al., 2011). The findings of Ward and Wegner revealed that participants provided self-reported instances of mind blanking, and they further suggest that the relationship between mind blanking and meta-awareness is dynamic over time. ...
Mind blanking is a mental state in which attention does not bring any perceptual input into conscious awareness. As this state is still largely unexplored, we suggest that a comprehensive understanding of mind blanking can be achieved through a multifaceted approach combining self‐assessment methods, neuroimaging and neuromodulation. In this article, we explain how electroencephalography and transcranial magnetic stimulation could be combined to help determine whether mind blanking is associated with a lack of mental content or a lack of linguistically or conceptually determinable mental content. We also question whether mind blanking occurs spontaneously or intentionally and whether these two forms are instantiated by the same or different neural correlates.
... Why are the default mode and dorsal attention networks important to consciousness? They play a crucial role as they correspond to our inward focus on ourselves and outward focus on the environment, respectively [120,121,[123][124][125][126][127]. In the conscious brain, these two systems are in a dynamic balance, sliding back and forth, but both are present to some extent. ...
... This is why the self is crucial in the emergence of consciousness, as it is the subject that is aware of the environment, and without a subject that is aware, there is no consciousness Why are the default mode and dorsal attention networks important to consciousness? They play a crucial role as they correspond to our inward focus on ourselves and outward focus on the environment, respectively [120,121,[123][124][125][126][127]. In the conscious brain, these two systems are in a dynamic balance, sliding back and forth, but both are present to some extent. ...
Time and space are fundamental elements that permeate the fabric of nature, and their significance in relation to neural activity and consciousness remains a compelling yet unexplored area of research. The Temporospatial Theory of Consciousness (TTC) provides a framework that links time, space, neural activity, and consciousness, shedding light on the intricate relationships among these dimensions. In this review, I revisit the fundamental concepts and mechanisms proposed by the TTC, with a particular focus on the central concept of temporospatial nestedness. I propose an extension of temporospatial nestedness by incorporating the nested relationship between the temporal circuit and functional geometry of the brain. To further unravel the complexities of temporospatial nestedness, future research directions should emphasize the characterization of functional geometry and the temporal circuit across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Investigating the links between these scales will yield a more comprehensive understanding of how spatial organization and temporal dynamics contribute to conscious states. This integrative approach holds the potential to uncover novel insights into the neural basis of consciousness and reshape our understanding of the world-brain dynamic.
... Conscious experiences are typically associated with meta-awareness when, at a given time, we exercise the ability to take explicit note of the current contents of our thoughts (Schooler et al., 2011;Dunne et al., 2019). However, there are moments when our thoughts seem to be empty, or their content is not accessible. ...
... Additionally, Ward and Wegner investigated the relationship between mind blanking and meta-awareness. Existing research indicates that self-reported and probe-caught accounts of mental states can be used to assess the relationship between a particular mental state and meta-awareness (Schooler et al., 2011). ...
Mind blanking is a mental state in which attention does not bring any perceptual input into conscious awareness. As this state is still largely unexplored, we suggest that a comprehensive understanding of mind blanking can be achieved through a multifaceted approach combining self-assessment methods, neuroimaging, and neuromodulation. In this article, we explain how EEG and TMS could be combined to help determine whether mind blanking is associated with a lack of mental content or a lack of linguistically or conceptually determinable mental content. We also question whether mind blanking occurs spontaneously or intentionally and whether these two forms are instantiated by the same or different neural correlates.
... Second, we assess how well each individual's brain activity across different levels of anaesthesia corresponds to canonical brain maps of cognitive operations obtained from meta-analytic aggregation of > 14, 000 neuroimaging experiments [96]. Although our study concerns task-free fMRI, we reasoned that even in the absence of any tasks the brain may still spontaneously engage states pertaining to various cognitive operations [3,18,42,60,77,80,81]. In contrast, this should not occur during loss of consciousness, when even intrinsicallydriven cognition should be abolished. ...
The human brain is characterised by idiosyncratic patterns of spontaneous thought, rendering each brain uniquely identifiable from its neural activity. However, deep general anaesthesia suppresses subjective experience. Does it also suppress what makes each brain unique? Here we used functional MRI under the effects of the general anaesthetics sevoflurane and propofol to determine whether anaesthetic-induced unconsciousness diminishes the uniqueness of the human brain: both with respect to the brains of other individuals, and the brains of another species. We report that under anaesthesia individual brains become less self-similar and less distinguishable from each other. Loss of distinctiveness is highly organised: it co-localises with the archetypal sensory-association axis, correlating with genetic and morphometric markers of phylogenetic differences between humans and other primates. This effect is more evident at greater anaesthetic depths, reproducible across sevoflurane and propofol, and reversed upon recovery. Providing convergent evidence, we show that under anaesthesia the functional connectivity of the human brain becomes more similar to the macaque brain. Finally, anaesthesia diminishes the match between spontaneous brain activity and meta-analytic brain patterns aggregated from the NeuroSynth engine. Collectively, the present results reveal that anaesthetised human brains are not only less distinguishable from each other, but also less distinguishable from the brains of other primates, with specifically human-expanded regions being the most affected by anaesthesia.
... The notion that the mere experience of "intrusiveness" might cause an intrusion to be aversive has further support in studies that tried to reveal the mechanism through which intrusive thoughts become aversive. First, intrusions trigger "meta-awareness" and "over-monitoring" over the occurrence of thoughts (de Bruin et al., 2007;Schooler et al., 2011;Vannucci et al., 2019), which by itself may lead to an increase in the number of intrusions (Bruin et el., 2007;Hattori & Kawaguchi, 2016;Wegner, 2009). The increased meta-awareness over thoughts can elicit a sense of "foreignness" of the thought. ...
Objective
Intrusive thoughts are characterized by a sense of intrusiveness of foreign entry into cognition. While not always consisting of negative content, intrusive thoughts are almost solely investigated in that context. Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) offers a promising alternative, as it is a type of involuntary cognition that can be used to evaluate intrusiveness without negative content.
Methods
In Study 1, 200 participants completed self‐report questionnaires to assess several aspects of intrusiveness: meta‐awareness, control, repetitiveness, frequency, and subjective experience of INMI. In Study 2, 203 participants completed self‐report questionnaires to explore the clinical characteristics (depression, stress, anxiety, and rumination) which might mediate the connection between INMI frequency and INMI negative experience.
Results
Study 1 revealed, through exploratory factor analysis, that intrusiveness shares variance with the negative experience of INMI but not with INMI frequency. In Study 2, ruminative thinking was found to mediate the relationship between frequent INMI and the negative experience of INMI.
Conclusion
These results suggest that INMI might be used to investigate intrusiveness in the lab without the potential confound of negative emotions. In addition, the results suggest that neither the content nor the frequency of intrusive thoughts can solely explain why these thoughts are aversive to some but not others. Ruminative style might be the missing link to explain how and why these intrusive thoughts become aversive and obsessive. In other words, we suggest that the cause for intrusiveness lies not in the thought or repetitiveness, but in the thinker.
... We were also interested in the broad concept of being focused on playing the game, both in terms of a positively valenced absorption 26,27 , and a more "meditative" quality of attending rather than allowing one's mind to wander 28,29 . We measured this quality of focusing on game play with the prompt "I was totally focused on playing Powerwash Simulator just now. ...
The potential impacts that video games might have on players’ well-being are under increased scrutiny but poorly understood empirically. Although extensively studied, a level of understanding required to address concerns and advise policy is lacking, at least partly because much of this science has relied on artificial settings and limited self-report data. We describe a large and detailed dataset that addresses these issues by pairing video game play behaviors and events with in-game well-being and motivation reports. 11,080 players (from 39 countries) of the first person PC game PowerWash Simulator volunteered for a research version of the game that logged their play across 10 in-game behaviors and events (e.g. task completion) and 21 variables (e.g. current position), and responses to 6 psychological survey instruments via in-game pop-ups. The data consists of 15,772,514 gameplay events, 726,316 survey item responses, and 21,202,667 additional gameplay status records, and spans 222 days. The data and codebook are publicly available with a permissive CC0 license.
... Whereas most theorizing about MW (see Schooler et al., 2011;Smallwood & Schooler, 2015;Thomson et al., 2015) has been based on laboratory studies, there are a few studies that were conducted in the field as well. Most prominently, Kane et al. (2007; see also Kane et al. 2017, for a replication) probed their participants in their daily life at various points in time and asked to rate, among other things, their state of mind and aspects of their current activity such as its difficulty. ...
The present investigation deals with individual differences in habitual (trait-
level) mind wandering and their effects on learning. We hypothesized that the
‘positive-constructive’ type of habitual mind wandering would promote task-
related thinking and the ‘poor-attention’ type to promote task-unrelated
thinking. This hypothesis was tested in a study with two-hundred participants
who rated different aspects of their mind wandering in daily life in one session
and completed a reading study in a second session. The reading study included
thought probes, retrospective questions about readers’ thought contents, and
comprehension tests after reading. In line with our hypothesis, data analysis
revealed that some forms of positive-constructive mind wandering were
positively associated with text-related thought, whereas poor-attention mind
wandering was positively associated with text-unrelated thought. The present
results add to the literature by emphasizing different types of trait-level mind
wandering and their potentially opposite effects on learning.
... Mental imagery could push internally generated high-level representations towards mid-level regions, interfering with the ascending processing of externally generated stimuli. This could explain why internal attention can affect the processing of environmental stimuli, such as during daydreaming (Schooler et al. 2011;Smallwood 2011). States of immersive mental imagery (e.g. ...
Mental imagery is a process by which thoughts become experienced with sensory characteristics. Yet, it is not clear why mental images appear diminished compared to veridical images, nor how mental images are phenomenologically distinct from hallucinations, another type of non-veridical sensory experience. Current evidence suggests that imagination and veridical perception share neural resources. If so, we argue that considering how neural representations of externally generated stimuli (i.e. sensory input) and internally generated stimuli (i.e. thoughts) might interfere with one another can sufficiently differentiate between veridical, imaginary, and hallucinatory perception. We here use a simple computational model of a serially connected, hierarchical network with bidirectional information flow to emulate the primate visual system. We show that modelling even first approximations of neural competition can more coherently explain imagery phenomenology than non-competitive models. Our simulations predict that, without competing sensory input, imagined stimuli should ubiquitously dominate hierarchical representations. However, with competition, imagination should dominate high-level representations but largely fail to outcompete sensory inputs at lower processing levels. To interpret our findings, we assume that low-level stimulus information (e.g. in early visual cortices) contributes most to the sensory aspects of perceptual experience, while high-level stimulus information (e.g. towards temporal regions) contributes most to its abstract aspects. Our findings therefore suggest that ongoing bottom-up inputs during waking life may prevent imagination from overriding veridical sensory experience. In contrast, internally generated stimuli may be hallucinated when sensory input is dampened or eradicated. Our approach can explain individual differences in imagery, along with aspects of daydreaming, hallucinations, and non-visual mental imagery.
... For example, there are objects of perception, then there is attention in relation to that perception, and there is also meta-awareness of changes in attentional deployment (e.g., noticing that "my attention has wandered", cf. Schooler et al., 2011). Likewise, in the case of insight, we have an idea, we also have a feeling about that idea, and we can also have a meta-awareness about the feeling (i.e., how confident am I that this feeling is trustworthy in this context?). ...
Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity's most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and eliciting a sense of intuitive confidence permitting fast action under uncertainty. The mechanisms underlying this Eureka heuristic are explained within an active inference framework. First, implicit restructuring via Bayesian reduction leads to a higher-order prediction error (i.e., the content of insight). Second, dopaminergic precision-weighting of the prediction error accounts for the intuitive confidence, pleasure, and attentional capture (i.e., the feeling of insight). This insight as precision account is consistent with the phenomenology, accuracy, and neural unfolding of insight, as well as its effects on belief and decision-making. We conclude by reflecting on dangers of the Eureka Heuristic, including the arising and entrenchment of false beliefs and the vulnerability of insights under psychoactive substances and misinformation.
... Here, focused reductions over occipital regions, combined with broad increases in alpha across other regions, are consistent with decreases in a mode of mind wandering, described as "sensory decoupling" or "attentional decoupling." That is, reductions in a mental state that is dominated by self-referential thought and is relatively disconnected with present-moment environmental circumstances [24][25][26]. The present findings of reduced bilateral frontal theta-band connectivity in the SB environment, relative to CBs, further supports the notion of a more mindful mental state, as hyperconnectivity between frontal regions has been associated with low mindfulness and heightened mind wandering [27 ]. ...
The objective of this experimental project is to develop, test, and validate a data-driven neuroscience approach, using virtual environments with electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) approaches. The goal is to provide objective neurophysiological information about how people respond to built environments and how sustain¬able buildings (SBs) impact people differently compared to conventional buildings (CBs). The hypotheses are centered on assessing for increased visual engagement with the SBs (views of external natural environment and internal spatial arrangement). The core framework is based on the idea that greater engagement with the built environment will enhance mindfulness (greater focus on the present environment), which will reduce stress and increase engagement with present-focused tasks. We employed both conventional time-domain and more advanced time-frequency analyses to assess brain activity while participants engaged in the environments.
... Mind-wandering is often characterized by disengagement from the immediate environment, thinking about what is unrelated to the here and now (Schooler et al., 2011;Smallwood et al., 2007). It is thought to result from internal attention but can be spontaneous or deliberate (Zedelius & Schooler, 2020). ...
In popular imagination creativity requires us to surrender control. Yet, attention is at the heart of control, and many studies show attention to play a key role in the creative process. This is partly due to the selective nature of attention—creative cognition consists of two phases, idea generation and idea evaluation, and selective processes are essential for both phases. Here, we investigate attentional (i.e., selective) mechanisms underlying each phase, using the framework of two major attention taxonomies: top-down/bottom-up and internal/external attention. We argue that creative cognition is supported by a dynamic interplay between the typically opposing sides of each taxonomy. Further, we argue that this dynamic relationship is reflected in interactions across three large-scale brain networks: the default mode (DMN), frontoparietal control (FPN), and salience (SN) networks. Our review of the evidence suggests that creative cognition is best achieved through the flexible use of multiple forms of attention, rather than through reduced attention. We thus propose a two-dimensional space, including one dimension for top-down/bottom-up attention and another for internal/external attention, which can sufficiently capture the flexibility and diversity of attentional mechanisms underlying different stages and components of creative cognition.
... If one is imagining a totally fictive scenario not directly related to oneself (e.g., the first contact between humans and an alien race), or imagining something self-related in the present (e.g., what food to eat now), these exercises in imagination are not MTT. Mind wandering and daydreaming (largely synonyms) constitute arbitrary thoughts experienced when engaged in attention-demanding tasks [48], such as when one catches oneself thinking about something unrelated to the book one is reading. Since both may occur in the present and be non-self in nature, they must not be equated with MTT. ...
In this paper, I tentatively answer 50 questions sampled from a pool of over 10,000 weekly questions formulated by students in a course entitled “The Self”. The questions pertain to various key topics related to self-processes, such as self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-regulation, self-talk, self-esteem, and self-recognition. The students’ weekly questions and their answers highlight what is currently known about the self. Answers to the student questions also allow for the identifi- cation of some recurrent lessons about the self. Some of these lessons include: all self-processes are interconnected (e.g., prospection depends on autobiography), self-terms must be properly de- fined (e.g., self-rumination and worry are not the same), inner speech plays an important role in self-processes, controversies are numerous (are animals self-aware?), measurement issues abound (e.g., self-recognition as an operationalization of self-awareness), deficits in some self-processes can have devastating effects (e.g., self-regulatory deficits may lead to financial problems), and there are lots of unknowns about the self (e.g., gender differences in Theory-of-Mind).
... Self-awareness is well captured in constructs such as mindful awareness (Brown & Ryan, 2003;Kabat-Zinn, 2015), meta-awareness (e.g. Schooler et al., 2011), mindsight (Siegel, , 2018 and mentalization (particularly the subscale of mentalization of self; Dimitrijevic et al., 2018), and refers here to the ability to listen to and better understand the self. Targets of such awareness include one's reactions, bodily sensations, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, attributions, values, behavior, influence on others, etc. wrote that self-awareness takes the longest to unfold. ...
This thesis follows two main lines of inquiry into well-being processes: 1) a theoretical
exploration of personal growth, defined as the gradual growth of well-being, and 2) an empirical exploration of students’ mental health profiles and sense of self. Altogether five studies are included in the thesis, two of which follow the first line of inquiry (articles I and II) and three of which follow the second (articles III, IV, and V). The first line of inquiry has the aims of 1) integrating parts of the subfields of positive and humanistic psychology (article I) and 2) suggesting a model of personal growth based on Carl Rogers’ (1961) person-centred humanistic theory of therapeutic change operationalized into constructs mainly from positive psychology (article II). This model of personal growth is intended to provide positive psychology and positive education a theory of well-being change that could serve as the basis for a framework for well-being interventions at schools. To promote well-being, one must know how well-being changes; the present thesis aims to fill this gap in the research. The other line of inquiry has the overarching aim of studying facets of this theoretical process among adolescents – adolescents’ mental health profiles (article IV), as well as adolescents’ sense of self and mental health (article V). Additionally, article III is a validation study of one of the adolescent well-being scales we used. Adolescent mental health should be understood in a nuanced way through profiles, whereby mental health symptoms and well-being are seen as separate continuums that can co-occur in complex ways. We found five different mental health profiles among adolescents: complete mental health, moderate mental health, vulnerable, symptomatic but managing and troubled. People develop a sense of self throughout adolescence, often characterized by a conflicting sense of self in early and mid-adolescence, turning in later adolescence towards greater coherence and authenticity, which are aspects of personal growth. We found that the self-processes of self-awareness and self-compassion are conducive to adolescent authenticity, which was in line with the theoretical model. This thesis contributes to new theoretical developments and research surrounding personal growth and adolescent well-being processes. Future research is suggested to take the study of personal growth further with evaluation of the model, building measurement scales, and framing new well-being intervention initiatives from the perspective of personal growth.
... Of particular interest to the current chapter are the three different measurements of attentional control that dominate the mindfulness literature field: sustained attention, attentional control, and conflict monitoring. In addition, whenever attention involuntarily drifts away from a focal point during a task, for example, during mindfulness practice, the default mode network becomes important (Mason et al. 2007) as it activates during involuntary engagement in task-unrelated thoughts or mind wandering (Schooler et al., 2011). ...
The aim of the empirical work reported in this thesis was to examine the impact of mindfulness on creative cognition and visual attention. The first investigation comprised two meta-analytical reviews to determine the overarching outcome that mindfulness interventions have on creativity and considered the role of intervention length, the type of creativity assessed and the methodological differences of mindfulness studies. The next investigation involved a short-term mindfulness intervention to examine the outcomes on visual attention in a flanker task and a sustained attention to response task (SART), including outcomes on creative cognition using rebus puzzles. The final empirical study examined the links between visual attention using the flanker task and convergent and divergent creative performance using the Compound Remote Associates Task (CRAT) and the Alternative Uses Task (AUT). Collectively, the thesis addresses the complicated relationship between mindfulness and creative cognition and elucidates the important role of attention inhibition and executive attention for convergent and divergent creative processes, which it is argued contribute to a stage of creative idea evaluation.
... The first works observed a relationship between LD and the global alpha band power (8)(9)(10)(11)(12) [53,54]. Later, a study detected an increase in the beta band power (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20) in the parietal region [55]. ...
Recent studies have begun to understand sleep not only as a whole-brain process but also as a complex local phenomenon controlled by specific neurotransmitters that act in different neural networks, which is called “local sleep”. Moreover, the basic states of human consciousness—wakefulness, sleep onset (N1), light sleep (N2), deep sleep (N3), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—can concurrently appear, which may result in different sleep-related dissociative states. In this article, we classify these sleep-related dissociative states into physiological, pathological, and altered states of consciousness. Physiological states are daydreaming, lucid dreaming, and false awakenings. Pathological states include sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, and REM sleep behavior disorder. Altered states are hypnosis, anesthesia, and psychedelics. We review the neurophysiology and phenomenology of these sleep-related dissociative states of consciousness and update them with recent studies. We conclude that these sleep-related dissociative states have a significant basic and clinical impact since their study contributes to the understanding of consciousness and the proper treatment of neuropsychiatric diseases.
... to people's meta-awareness (Schooler et al., 2011), and that people's responses can be influenced by reporting bias (Vinski & Watter, 2012). ...
... Certain conditions challenge the ability to sustain attention on task requirements, such as repetitive and undemanding tasks (e.g., driving on an empty highway). Attentional disengagement from task requirements occurs when the allocation of attentional resources shifts from an external to an internal state (Schooler et al., 2011;Smallwood et al., 2004;Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). This results in a lacking awareness of environmental stimuli, often referred to as perceptual decoupling (Christoff et al., 2009), due to mindwandering (more task-unrelated thoughts) (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) or mindlessness (less task-related and taskunrelated thoughts) (Manly et al., 1999). ...
Many activities in daily life rely on the ability to continuously keep attention on task requirements. Patients with acquired brain injury often suffer from deficits in sustained attention that impact quality of life and complicate rehabilitation. The sustained attention to response task (SART) is a commonly used go/no-go task in the assessment of sustained attention. However, its feasibility for patients with acquired brain injury could be questioned considering deficits in alphanumerical processing following brain damage. We investigated whether a SART with sinusoidal gratings instead of digits can be used to assess sustained attention. The Gratings SART and Digits SART were administered in a random and fixed sequence to 48 cognitively healthy participants. Performance of the neurotypical individuals on the random and fixed Gratings SART was only moderately different from and correlated with performance on the random and fixed Digits SART. As a proof of concept, the SARTs were also administered to 11 cases with acquired brain injury. Performance in the random and fixed variants of both the Gratings SART and Digits SART was sensitive to cognitive impairments of cases with acquired brain injury. In conclusion, the SART with sinusoidal gratings holds promise as a tool to (re-)assess sustained attention in clinical practice. Further research is critical to investigate whether its performance accurately predicts sustained attention in daily life since we failed to find a significant correlation between performance on any of the SARTs and a self-reported measure of sustained attention.
... If one is imagining a totally fictive scenario not directly related to oneself (e.g., first contact between humans and an alien race), or imagining something self-related in the present (e.g., what food to eat now), then these exercises in imagination are not MTT. Mind wandering and daydreaming (largely synonyms) constitute arbitrary thoughts experienced when engaged in attention-demanding tasks (Schooler et al., 2011), as when one catches oneself thinking about something unrelated to the book one is reading. Since both may occur in the present and be non-self in nature, they must not be equated with MTT. ...
In this paper I tentatively answer 50 questions sampled from a pool of over 10,000 weekly questions formulated by students in a course entitled “The Self”. The questions pertain to various key topics about self-processes, such as self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-regulation, self-talk, self-esteem, and self-regulation. The students’ weekly questions and their answers highlight what is currently know about the self. Answers to the student questions also allow for the identification of some recurrent lessons about the self. Some of these lessons include: all self-processes are interconnected (e.g., prospection depends on autobiography), self-terms must be properly defined (e.g., self-rumination and worry are not the same), inner speech plays an important role in self-processes, controversies are numerous (are animals self-aware?), measurement issues abound (e.g., self-reflection as an operationalization of self-awareness), deficits in some self-processes can have devastating effects (e.g., self-regulatory deficits may lead to financial problems), and there are lots of unknowns about the self (e.g., gender differences in Theory-of-Mind).
... Additionally, both dreams and task-unrelated thoughts were rated neutral to slightly positive in valence across participants, similar to prior independent work on dreams and self-generated cognition 29,57,58 . The relatively low level of dream intentionality and awareness is consistent with activity reductions of the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep in non-lucid dreamers 4 and with observations that a significant fraction of task-unrelated thoughts are dream-like [59][60][61] and lack meta-awareness 62 . Given the general nature of our dream questionnaire, the neutral rating may reflect an average of multiple positive and negative emotional states, in line with some studies emphasizing a stronger degree of positive and/or negative emotions in dreams (see 4,63 ). ...
While recent neurocognitive theories have proposed links between dreams and waking life, it remains unclear what kinds of waking thoughts are most similar in their phenomenological characteristics to those of dreams. To investigate this question and examine relevance of dreams to significant personal concerns and dispositional mental health traits, we employed ecological momentary assessment and trait questionnaires across 719 young adults who completed the study during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time marked by considerable societal concern. Across the group and at the level of individual differences, dreams showed the highest correspondence with task-unrelated thoughts. Participants who self-reported greater COVID-19 concern rated their dreams as more negative and unconstructive, a relationship which was moderated by trait rumination. Furthermore, dreams perceived as more negative unconstructive and immersive in nature associated with increased trait rumination beyond variation in rumination explained by waking task-unrelated thoughts alone. Together, these results point to similarities between perceived characteristics of dreams and task-unrelated thoughts, and support a relationship between dreams, current concerns, and mental health.
... Self-awareness is well captured in constructs such as mindful awareness (Brown & Ryan, 2003;Kabat-Zinn, 2015), meta-awareness (e.g. Schooler et al., 2011), mindsight (Siegel, 2011(Siegel, , 2018 and mentalization (particularly the subscale of mentalization of self; Dimitrijević et al., 2018), and refers here to the ability to listen to and better understand the self. Targets of such awareness include one's reactions, bodily sensations, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, attributions, values, behavior, influence on others, etc. Rogers (1961) wrote that self-awareness takes the longest to unfold. ...
Personal growth as a process remains vaguely understood. We introduce the Personal Growth Process (PGP) model based on Carl Rogers's organismic valuing process (OVP). The PGP model explains personal growth as a sociocognitive embodied process whereby an individual undergoes multiple mental shifts that make up an ongoing, fluctuating process over the long term, starting from a place of psychological safety. The mental shifts occurring throughout the growth process are broadly categorized as self-awareness, openness towards experiencing and change, existential courage, autonomy/internal locus of control, taking responsibility for the self and others, self-compassion, and compassion towards others. These shifts all represent progress toward well-being, defined here as authenticity, harmony and life-satisfaction. Importantly, the model does not include only individual psychological constructs, but ties the process to one's social environment and common social responsibility.
... As immersion itself is in part characterised by a lack of meta-awareness (Agrawal et al., 2020), reporting on the experience retrospectively within a questionnaire may be difficult (e.g. see research on the difficulty of reporting mind-wandering; Schooler et al., 2011). Despite this, we have shown several instances where behavioural and physiological measures appear to index self-reported immersion, suggesting that both measures are tapping into the underlying concept of immersion. ...
When an audience member becomes immersed, their attention shifts towards the media and story, and they allocate cognitive resources to represent events and characters. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to measure immersion using continuous behavioural and physiological measures. Using television and film clips, we validated dual-task reaction times, heart rate, and skin conductance against self-reported narrative engagement. We find that reaction times to a secondary task were strongly positively correlated with self-reported immersion: slower reaction times were indicative of greater immersion, particularly emotional engagement. Synchrony in heart rate across participants was associated with self-reported attentional and emotional engagement with the story, although we found no such relationship with skin conductance. These results establish both dual-task reaction times and heart rate as candidate measures for the real-time, continuous, assessment of audience immersion.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41235-023-00475-0.
Our minds frequently wander from a task at hand. This mind-wandering reflects fluctuations in our cognitive states. The phenomenon of perceptual rivalry, in which one of the mutually exclusive percepts automatically switches to an ambiguous sensory input, is also known as fluctuations in our perceptual states. There may be possible relationships between the mind-wandering and perceptual rivalry, given that physiological responses such as fluctuations in pupil diameter, which is an index of attentional/arousal states, are related to the occurrence of both phenomena. Here, we investigate possible relationships between mind-wandering and perceptual rivalry by combining experimental
and questionnaire methods in an online research protocol. In Study 1, we found no statistically significant relationships between subjective mind-wandering tendencies measured by questionnaires and frequencies of perceptual rivalry for Necker-cube or structure-from-motion stimuli. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 and further confirmed no statistically significant relationships between behavioral measurements of mind-wandering tendencies estimated by sustained attention to response task and frequencies of perceptual rivalry. These findings suggest that mind-wandering
and perceptual rivalry would be based on different mechanisms, possibly higher-level cognitive and lower-level perceptual ones.
Evidence supports the dissociation of voluntary and spontaneous routes to past and future thinking, collectively referred to as mental time travel (MTT). If the diminished voluntary MTT ability found in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is attributable to a deficit in constructive/generative processes not necessary for spontaneous MTT, ASD traits ( Autism Spectrum Quotient score) in a general adult sample should not be related to total spontaneous thoughts, probability of past or future thoughts, or probability of specific thoughts during an undemanding vigilance task. Results supported this hypothesis: AQ was not associated with total spontaneous thoughts and did not significantly predict the other measures. This is the first study to explore spontaneous MTT in relation to ASD traits, further supporting the argument that voluntary MTT may be compromised in ASD due to reliance on constructive/generative processes and reinforcing the notion of dissociable cognitive routes to MTT.
Mind wandering and daydreaming reflect non-deliberate and deliberate forms of mental exploration. However, it is not yet known to what extent the kinds of things that come to mind during these exploratory events are similar or different. The current research addresses this question by having participants engage in either a mindfulness task or a daydreaming task, with instructions to self-report novel thoughts as they occurred. Participants were then asked to rate their thoughts on valence, time orientation (past/present/future), and reality orientation (imaginary vs. real). Additionally, their emotional state was assessed using the Emotion Recall Task and PANAS questionnaire. Daydreaming produced a significantly greater number of thoughts compared to mind wandering. Daydreaming thoughts were also more positively valenced and future-oriented. Approximately 25% of thoughts were rated as imaginary, and this did not differ between mind wandering and daydreaming. However, an increase in future thinking was associated with a higher number of imaginary thoughts. Thought valence was predicted by both PANAS and ERT. These results suggest that mind wandering and daydreaming, while sharing many similarities, produce different kinds of thoughts and are not interchangeable.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the world, and its impact on leadership is still being explored. There is growing evidence that mindfulness can play a key role in helping leaders navigate AI’s challenges and opportunities. This chapter discusses how mindfulness can help leaders to:
Understand the risks and benefits of AI, its potential to automate jobs, create new forms of bias, and be used for unethical purposes. Mindful leaders can identify risks and develop strategies to mitigate them.
Make ethical decisions about AI, a powerful tool that can do good or evil. Mindful leaders can make ethical decisions around AI’s and ensure it benefits society.
Build stronger relationships with AI-powered systems, as they become increasingly sophisticated and capable of interacting with humans in more complex ways. Mindful leaders can build stronger relationships with these systems and leverage their capabilities.
This chapter delves into the relationship between AI and authentic leadership, suggesting:
Authentic leaders are open to new ideas and technologies, unafraid of change, and willing to experiment with new ways of working. This positions them to lead organizations through the transition to an AI-powered world.
Authentic leaders are transparent and ethical, honest with their employees, and use AI in a responsible way. This builds the trust and confidence essential for successful leadership.
Authentic leaders are compassionate and empathetic, understand the impact of AI on humanity, and are committed to using AI in a way that benefits society. This makes them role models for others and helps build a positive future.
Video review is commonly performed by learners to clarify or make up for the content they have missed. However, it is not well supported in the current video learning environment. In this paper, we investigated the design of techniques to facilitate effective video review. Through a preliminary study, we observed learners’ review behaviors, identified their challenges, and derived three design goals. We then designed two review techniques, concept map based review (CMReview) and text summary based review (TSReview). Evaluation studies were conducted to understand learners’ post-review learning performance and review experiences using both techniques on short and long videos. Results showed similar learning performance for short videos across both techniques, but CMReview improved understanding for long videos and was preferred by most users. We conclude by discussing implications for integrating with current video learning platforms.
KeywordsVideo reviewConcept mapText summary
Traditionally, neuroscience and psychology have studied the human brain during periods of "online" attention to the environment, whereas participants actively engage in processing sensory stimuli. However, emerging evidence shows that the waking brain also intermittently enters an "offline" state, during which sensory processing is inhibited and our attention shifts inward. In fact, humans may spend up to half of their waking hours offline [Wamsley, E. J., & Summer, T. Spontaneous entry into an "offline" state during wakefulness: A mechanism of memory consolidation? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32, 1714-1734, 2020; Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330, 932, 2010]. The function of alternating between online and offline forms of wakefulness remains unknown. We hypothesized that rapidly switching between online and offline states enables the brain to alternate between the competing demands of encoding new information and consolidating already-encoded information. N = 46 participants (34 female) trained on a memory task just before a 30-min retention interval, during which they completed a simple attention task while undergoing simultaneous high-density EEG and pupillometry recording. We used a data-driven method to parse this retention interval into a sequence of discrete online and offline states, with a 5-sec temporal resolution. We found evidence for three distinct states, one of which was an offline state with features well-suited to support memory consolidation, including increased EEG slow oscillation power, reduced attention to the external environment, and increased pupil diameter (a proxy for increased norepinephrine). Participants who spent more time in this offline state following encoding showed improved memory at delayed test. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that even brief, seconds-long entry into an offline state may support the early stages of memory consolidation.
Purpose
As innovations introduce novel benefits to customers, they would need to be positioned in a way that sets them apart in the market. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel approach for the positioning of innovations with the use of the customer imagination and, specifically, mental movies.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the schema approach as this study’s theoretical framework, the author proposes that innovations could be positioned using moving pictures (i.e. mental movies) instead of mental pictures (the approach traditionally taken).
Findings
A new conceptual framework for the positioning of innovations using mental movies is presented. In the framework, this study outlines how innovations can be positioned with the use of mental movies, and why such an approach would be beneficial. The framework outlines mixed reality, i.e. augmented reality, augmented virtuality and virtuality, as well as the metaverse and gaming as avenues for positioning innovations using mental movies. On the benefit side, the framework identifies successful market introductions, engagement and stickiness, memorability and positive emotions, uniqueness and differentiation and market share as the concrete benefits that can be achieved with this type of positioning.
Originality/value
The framework provides a novel approach for the positioning of innovations. It departs from existing literature by proposing that innovations can be positioned using mental movies. The framework also identifies why this approach would be beneficial for marketers and managers and provides concrete guidelines for how such a positioning can be achieved in the market.
In this paper, through the lens of psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology, we analyze and discuss mind-wandering as a mental dilemmatic phenomenon that is always considered in a continuum between two poles, pathology and normality. These lenses are the same ones used by Boggi to treat her main themes: the self, the human subjectivity, gender and sexuality, family and socialization, language and ideology, the genealogy of femininity, cultural identities, and forms of political domination. We used Lou Andreas Salomè and Anna Freud as tools and links for describing the early work of psychoanalysis, treating women in psychoanalysis, connecting femininity and mind-wandering, and going toward a more contemporaneous approach. Thus, we considered the Gestalt psychological view on this phenomenon, and Stemberger presents the concepts and findings of the Gestalt psychological multiple-field approach in understanding mind-wandering and related phenomena and briefly underlines its potential.KeywordsMind-wandering and correlated phenomenaEarly psychoanalysisGestalt psychologyMultiple field approach
Introduction
Over the last decade, excessive spontaneous mind wandering (MW) has been consistently associated with emotional disorders. The main aims of the present study were (1) to re-examine the factor structure of the Mind Excessively Wandering Scale (MEWS); (2) to validate the Spanish version of the MEWS; and (3) to conduct a cross-cultural validation of the MEWS in Spanish and UK samples.
Methods
A forward/backward translation to Spanish was conducted. Data of 391 Spanish and 713 British non-clinical individuals were analysed.
Results
A revised 10-item version of the MEWS (MEWS-v2.0) demonstrated to be a valid instrument to assess MW. A 2-correlated factor structure properly captured the MEWS-v2.0 variance, accounting for two specific but interrelated dimensions ( Uncontrolled thoughts and Mental Overactivity ).
Discussion
The Spanish MEWS-v2.0 showed adequate internal consistency and construct validity, as well as appropriate convergent/divergent validity. Cross-cultural analyses showed that MEWS-v2.0 captured the same construct in both UK and Spanish samples. In conclusion, both Spanish and English MEWS-v2.0 demonstrated to be reliable measures to capture spontaneous MW phenomenon in non-clinical adult populations.
Distraction reflects a drift of attention away from the task at hand towards task-irrelevant external or internal information (mind-wandering). The right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are known to mediate attention to external information and mind-wandering, respectively, but it is not clear whether they support each process selectively or rather they play similar roles in supporting both. In this study, participants performed a visual search task including salient color singleton distractors before and after receiving cathodal (inhibitory) transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the right PPC, the mPFC, or sham tDCS. Thought probes assessed the intensity and contents of mind-wandering during visual search. The results show that tDCS to the right PPC but not mPFC reduced the attentional capture by the singleton distractor during visual search. tDCS to both mPFC and PPC reduced mind-wandering, but only tDCS to the mPFC specifically reduced future-oriented mind-wandering. These results suggest that the right PPC and mPFC play a different role in directing attention towards task-irrelevant information. The PPC is involved in both external and internal distraction, possibly by mediating the disengagement of attention from the current task and its reorienting to salient information, be this a percept or a mental content (mind-wandering). By contrast, the mPFC uniquely supports mind-wandering, possibly by mediating the endogenous generation of future-oriented thoughts capable to draw attention inward, away from ongoing activities.
Epistemic injustice is a matter of not doing justice to the knowledge claims of a person, and it is pervasive in our everyday interactions. It can be traced to the susceptibility of the human mind to cognitive biases and distortions. The paper discusses some ways proposed to mitigate epistemic injustice and suggests that this endeavor requires efforts in more dimensions. The paper tries to demonstrate that the existing efforts to combat epistemic injustice need to be complemented by looking into the very manner in which the self is automatically conceptualized. A shift from the remembering or narrative mode of understanding oneself to the experiential or episodic one will help contain misleading biases and reduce epistemic injustice. Practices such as mindfulness can help enormously in this task.
Catecholamine-enhancing psychostimulants, such as methylphenidate have long been argued to undermine creative thinking. However, prior evidence for this is weak or contradictory, stemming from studies with small sample sizes that do not consider the well-established large variability in psychostimulant effects across different individuals and task demands. We aimed to definitively establish the link between psychostimulants and creative thinking by measuring effects of methylphenidate in 90 healthy participants on distinct creative tasks that measure convergent and divergent thinking, as a function of individuals' baseline dopamine synthesis capacity, indexed with 18F-FDOPA PET imaging. In a double-blind, within-subject design, participants were administered methylphenidate, placebo or selective D2 receptor antagonist sulpiride. The results showed that striatal dopamine synthesis capacity and/or methylphenidate administration did not affect divergent and convergent thinking. However, exploratory analysis demonstrated a baseline dopamine-dependent effect of methylphenidate on a measure of response divergence, a creativity measure that measures response variability. Response divergence was reduced by methylphenidate in participants with low dopamine synthesis capacity but enhanced in those with high dopamine synthesis capacity. No evidence of any effect of sulpiride was found. These results show that methylphenidate can undermine certain forms of divergent creativity but only in individuals with low baseline dopamine levels.
This study investigated the potential adaptive aspects of mind wandering (MW), a common phenomenon in which individuals shift their attention from external tasks to internal thoughts. Despite the well-documented negative effects of MW on cognitive performance and links to psychiatric conditions, there is a scarcity of direct evidence of its potential benefits. In our preregistered study, we simultaneously assessed visuomotor task performance as well as the capability to extract probabilistic information from the environment while assessing task focus (on-task vs. MW). We found that MW facilitated the extraction of hidden, but predictable patterns from a stream of visual inputs. Moreover, MW influenced speed/accuracy tradeoff by shifting participants towards a faster but less accurate response style. These findings suggest that MW may have functional relevance in human cognition and everyday functioning by shaping behavior and predictive processes. Overall, our results highlight the importance of considering the adaptive aspects of MW, and its potential to enhance cognitive abilities.
Philosophers and neuroscientists address central issues in both fields, including morality, action, mental illness, consciousness, perception, and memory.
Philosophers and neuroscientists grapple with the same profound questions involving consciousness, perception, behavior, and moral judgment, but only recently have the two disciplines begun to work together. This volume offers fourteen original chapters that address these issues, each written by a team that includes at least one philosopher and one neuroscientist, who integrate disciplinary perspectives and reflect the latest research in both fields. Topics include morality, empathy, agency, the self, mental illness, neuroprediction, optogenetics, pain, vision, consciousness, memory, concepts, mind wandering, and the neural basis of psychological categories.
The chapters first address basic issues about our social and moral lives: how we decide to act and ought to act toward each other, how we understand each other's mental states and selves, and how we deal with pressing social problems regarding crime and mental or brain health. The following chapters consider basic issues about our mental lives: how we classify and recall what we experience, how we see and feel objects in the world, how we ponder plans and alternatives, and how our brains make us conscious and create specific mental states.
Contributors
Sara Abdulla, Eyal Aharoni, Corey H. Allen, Sara Aronowitz, Jenny Blumenthal-Barby, Ned Block, Allison J. Brager, Antonio Cataldo, Tony Cheng, Felipe De Brigard, Rachel N. Denison, Jim A. C. Everett, Gidon Felsen, Julia Haas, Hyemin Han, Zac Irving, Kristina Krasich, Enoch Lambert, Cristina Leon, Anna Leshinskaya, Jordan L. Livingston, Brian Maniscalco, Joshua May, Joseph McCaffrey, Jorge Morales, Samuel Murray, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Laura Niemi, Brian Odegaard, Hannah Read, Robyn Repko Waller, Sarah Robins, Jason Samaha, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Joshua August Skorburg, Shannon Spaulding, Arjen Stolk, Rita Svetlova, Natalia Washington, Clifford Workman, Jessey Wright
The dual-channel assumption of the cognitive theory of multimedia learning suggests that importing a large amount of information through a single (visual or audio) channel overloads that channel, causing partial loss of information, while importing it simultaneously through multiple channels relieves the burden on them and leads to the registration of a larger amount of information. In light of such knowledge, this study investigates the possibility of reinforcing visual stimuli with audio for supporting e-learners in memorization tasks. Specifically, we consider three kinds of learning material and two kinds of audio stimuli and partially reinforce each kind of material with each kind of stimuli in an arbitrary way. In a series of experiments, we determine the particular type of audio, which offers the highest improvement for each kind of material. Our work stands out as being the first study investigating the differences in memory performance in relation to different combinations of learning content and stimulus. Our key findings from the experiments are: (i) E-learning is more effective in refreshing memory rather than studying from scratch, (ii) Non-informative audio is more suited to verbal content, whereas informative audio is better for numerical content, (iii) Constant audio triggering degrades learning performance and thus audio triggering should be handled with care. Based on these findings, we develop an ANN-based estimator to determine the proper moment for triggering audio (i.e. when memory performance is estimated to be declining) and carry out follow-up experiments for testing the integrated framework. Our contributions involve (i) determination of the most effective audio for each content type, (ii) estimation of memory deterioration based on learners’ interaction logs, and (iii) the proposal of improvement of memory registration through auditory reinforcement. We believe that such findings constitute encouraging evidence the memory registration of e-learners can be enhanced with content-aware audio incorporation.
The neuroscience of creativity seeks to disentangle the complex brain processes that underpin the generation of novel ideas. Neuroimaging studies of functional connectivity, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have revealed individual differences in brain network organization associated with creative ability; however, much of the extant research is limited to laboratory-based divergent thinking measures. To overcome these limitations, we compare functional brain connectivity in a cohort of creative experts (n = 29) and controls (n = 25) and examine links with creative behavior. First, we replicate prior findings showing reduced connectivity in visual cortex related to higher creative performance. Second, we examine whether this result is driven by integrated or segregated connectivity. Third, we examine associations between functional connectivity and vivid distal simulation separately in creative experts and controls. In accordance with past work, our results show reduced connectivity within primary visual cortex in creative experts at rest. Additionally, we observe a negative association between distal simulation vividness and connectivity to the lateral visual cortex in creative experts. Taken together, these results highlight connectivity profiles of highly creative people and suggest that creative thinking may be related to, though not fully redundant with, the ability to vividly imagine the future.
Meta-awareness is a state of deliberate attention toward the contents of conscious thought, serving as an appraisal of experiential consciousness. Meta-awareness is necessary for such uniquely human tasks as monitoring and controlling conscious thought, while lapses in meta-awareness make room for such phenomena as mind wandering and unwanted thoughts. Further, meta-awareness can be problematic because it is limited in scope and costly to maintain. Recent research on mindfulness-based meditation provides an example of a process that can cull the advantages of meta-aware states, while avoiding many of the drawbacks.
Discovered memories of abuse are often viewed with marked skepticism due to the relative dearth of well-corroborated evidence for their occurrence and the absence of a compelling theory to explain them. This article addresses these concerns by reviewing seven recovered (or, as will be explained, what I prefer to term “discovered”) memory cases in which there was independent corroborative evidence for the alleged abuse. These cases are considered within the context of a theory of meta-awareness that assumes that experiential consciousness (i.e., the contents of phenomenological experience) can be distinct from meta-awareness (i.e., one's consciousness of their consciousness). In this context, discovered memories can be understood as involving changes in individuals' meta-awareness of the abuse. In some cases, discovered memories may involve the gaining of a different meta-awareness of the meaning of an experience. The discovery of this new meaning may become confused with the discovery of the memory itself, leading to the (sometimes erroneous) belief that the memory is just now being accessed for the first time. In other cases, the discovery may involve the regaining of a prior meta-awareness of the experience that either deliberately or non-deliberately may have been avoided for some time. In still other cases, the discovery may actually involve the gaining of a previously non-existent meta-awareness of the experience. A variety of factors ranging from the very straightforward (e.g., age, lack of discussion, stress) to the more esoteric (e.g., dissociation, nocturnal cognitive processing) may prevent incidents of abuse from being initially encoded with meta-awareness. Such non-reflected memories, particularly when they are aschematic and disjunctive with other experiences, may continue to elude meta-awareness until a specific (and potentially obscure) contextual retrieval cue is encountered. Once recalled in the alarming light of meta-awareness, individuals may understand what happened to them, and this discovery may fundamentally change their view of their personal histories.
Nine previous positron emission tomography (PET) studies of human visual information processing were reanalyzed to determine the consistency across experiments of blood flow decreases during active tasks relative to passive viewing of the same stimulus array. Areas showing consistent decreases during active tasks included posterior cingulate/precuneous (Brodmann area, BA 31/7), left (BAS 40 and 39/19) and right (BA 40) inferior parietal cortex, left dorsolateral frontal cortex (BA S), left lateral inferior frontal cortex (BA 10/47), left inferior temporal gyrus @A 20), a strip of medial frontal regions running along a dorsal-ventral axis (BAs 8, 9, 10, and 32), and the right amygdala.
Experiments involving language-related processes tended to show larger decreases than nonlanguage experiments. This trend mainly reflected blood flow increases at certain areas in the passive conditions of the language experiments (relative to a fixation control in which no task stimulus was present) and slight blood flow decreases in the passive conditions of the nonlanguage experiments. When the active tasks were referenced to the fixation condition, the overall size of blood flow decreases in language and nonlanguage tasks were the same, but differences were found across cortical areas. Decreases were more pronounced in the posterior cingulate/precuneous (BAS 31/7) and right inferior parietal cortex (BA 40) during language-related tasks and more pronounced in left inferior frontal cortex (BA 10/47) during nonlanguage tasks.
Blood flow decreases did not generally show significant differences across the active task states within an experiment, but a verb-generation task produced larger decreases than a read task in right and left inferior parietal lobe (BA 40) and the posterior cingulate/precuneous (BA 31/7), while the read task produced larger decreases in left lateral inferior frontal cortex (BA 10/47). These effects mirrored those found between experiments in the language-nonlanguage comparison.
Consistent active minus passive decreases may reflect decreased activity caused by active task processes that generalize over tasks or increased activity caused by passive task processes that are suspended during the active tasks. Increased activity during the passive condition might reflect ongoing processes, such as unconstrained verbally mediated thoughts and monitoring of the external environment, body, and emotional state.
Introspection is paradoxical in that it is simultaneously so compelling yet so elusive. This paradox emerges because although experience itself is indisputable, our ability to explicitly characterize experience is often inadequate. Ultimately, the accuracy of introspective reports depends on individuals' imperfect ability to take stock (i.e., to become meta- conscious) of their experience. Although there is no ideal yardstick for assessing introspection, examination of the degree to which self-reports systematically covary with the environmental, behavioural, and physiological concomitants of experience can help to establish the correspondence between meta-consciousness and experience. We illustrate the viability of such an approach in three domains, imagery, mind-wandering, and hedonic appraisal, identifying both the situations in which introspections appear to be accurate and those in which they seem to diverge from underlying experience. We conclude with a discussion of the various factors (including issues of detection, transformation, and substitution) that may cause meta-consciousness to misrepresent experience.
This paper explores the interplay between unconscious, conscious, and metaconscious processes in social cognition. We distinguish among mental states that are (i) genuinely unaware, (ii) aware, but lack meta-awareness, and (iii) meta-aware—internally articulated as states of the perceiver. We review key studies from our own and related research programmes to highlight this theoretical framework, and to illustrate access, translational, and temporary dissociations between levels of awareness. The discussed phenomena include unconscious affect, mind-wandering, verbal overshadowing, theory-based biases in reporting of experiences, and many others. We also show how our framework can offer new perspectives on some classic social psychology findings and inspire discovery of new findings. However, we also highlight challenges inherent in establishing whether a phenomenon is genuinely unconscious or experientially conscious but lacking in meta-awareness.
When people encounter problems in translating their goals into action (e.g., failing to get started, becoming distracted, or falling into bad habits), they may strategically call on automatic processes in an attempt to secure goal attainment. This can be achieved by plans in the form of implementation intentions that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses ("Whenever situation
x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response
y!"). Implementation intentions delegate the control of goal-directed responses to anticipated situational cues, which (when actually encountered) elicit these responses automatically. A program of research demonstrates that implementation intentions further the attainment of goals, and it reveals the underlying processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A SUMMARY OF 16 PAIRED-ASSOCIATE (PA) EXPERIMENTS SHOWED THAT ALTHOUGH DISTRIBUTED PRACTICE (DP) SELDOM RESULTED IN PERFORMANCE THAT WAS SIGNIFICANT STATISTICALLY OVER THAT SHOWN UNDER MASSED PRACTICE (MP), THE PREPONDERANCE OF THE NUMERICAL DIFFERENCES FAVORED DP. A SUMMARY OF 9 COMPARISONS BETWEEN MP AND DP ON A 4TH-LEARNED LIST WITH VARIOUS INTERFERENCE PARADIGMS OBTAINING ACROSS LISTS SHOWED THAT DP WAS ALWAYS INFERIOR TO MP. THESE STUDIES FORMED THE BACKGROUND TO A STUDY OF PA LEARNING USING NAIVE SS AND IN WHICH THE VARIABLES WERE INTERTRIAL INTERVAL, SIMILARITY AMONG TRIGRAMS, DEGREE OF FREE LEARNING (FL) PRECEDING PA LEARNING, AND POSITION OF THE TRIGRAMS. THE NEUTRAL MEMBERS OF THE PAIRS WERE WORDS. WITH TRIGRAMS AS STIMULI, DP FACILITATED ONLY WITH HIGH SIMILARITY. WITH TRIGRAMS AS RESPONSE TERMS, NUMERICAL SUPERIORITY OCCURRED AT ALL LEVELS OF SIMILARITY BUT THE EFFECT WAS GREATEST WITH MEDIUM AND HIGH SIMILARITY. FL MARKEDLY FACILITATED PA LEARNING AT ALL LEVELS OF SIMILARITY FOR BOTH TRIGRAM-WORD AND WORD-TRIGRAM PAIRS, BUT IT DID NOT INTERACT WITH INTERTRIAL INTERVAL. AN ASSOCIATIVE-INHIBITION EXPLANATION OF THE DP EFFECT IS SUGGESTED. (21 REF.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Measured the production of stimulus-independent thought (e.g., fantasy and imagery) as a function of the rate at which information was presented to 50 undergraduates. Information in the form of simple tones was presented at rates from .2-6 bits/sec. The linear regression of reported stimulus-independent thought on information rate accounted for 83% of the between cell variance. Results support a model in which both sensory and memory events are operated on by a common central cognitive unit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Mind-wandering shares a number of important similarities with thinking in depression. This experiment examines whether mind-wandering provides a useful marker of cognition in dysphoria during a word learning task. Dysphoria was associated with more accessible mind-wandering when attempting to encode verbal items. In addition, in the dysphoric population, periods when the mind wandered led to greater decoupling from task-relevant processing as indexed by slower response times, and greater physiological arousal, as indexed by faster heart rates. In the general population, periods of mind-wandering when attempting to encode information were associated with poor retrieval and high skin conductance. Finally, the extent to which mind-wandering was associated with poor retrieval was associated with an individuals' latency to retrieve specific autobiographical memories from outside the laboratory. These results provide strong evidence for the utility of mind-wandering as a marker for depressive thinking and suggest a number of important implications for therapy for depression.
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Two functionally distinct, and potentially competing, brain networks have been recently identified that can be broadly distinguished by their contrasting roles in attention to the external world versus internally directed mentation involving long-term memory. At the core of these two networks are the dorsal attention system and the hippocampal-cortical memory system, a component of the brain's default network. Here spontaneous blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal correlations were used in three separate functional magnetic resonance imaging data sets (n = 105) to define a third system, the frontoparietal control system, which is spatially interposed between these two previously defined systems. The frontoparietal control system includes many regions identified as supporting cognitive control and decision-making processes including lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and inferior parietal lobule. Detailed analysis of frontal and parietal cortex, including use of high-resolution data, revealed clear evidence for contiguous but distinct regions: in general, the regions associated with the frontoparietal control system are situated between components of the dorsal attention and hippocampal-cortical memory systems. The frontoparietal control system is therefore anatomically positioned to integrate information from these two opposing brain systems.
Although mind wandering during reading is extremely common, researchers have only recently begun to study how it relates to reading behavior. In the present study, we used a word-by-word reading paradigm to investigate whether it could be possible to predict in real time whether a participant would report mind wandering when probed. By taking advantage of the finding that reaction times to individual words vary based on reports of mind wandering (with participants being less affected by length, number of syllables, and familiarity, and also showing an overall speed-up, during mindless reading), we were able to develop an algorithm that could successfully predict in real time whether a participant would report being on versus off task. In addition, for participants run without thought probes, there was a significant negative correlation between the number of predicted mind-wandering episodes and reading comprehension. Together, these findings offer a key advance toward the development of pedagogical tools for minimizing the negative impact of mindless reading, and they provide a new covert measure that could be used to study mind wandering without requiring participants to report on their mental states.
Accumulating evidence suggests that the brain can efficiently process both external and internal information. The processing of internal information is a distinct "offline" cognitive mode that requires not only spontaneously generated mental activity; it has also been hypothesized to require a decoupling of attention from perception in order to separate competing streams of internal and external information. This process of decoupling is potentially adaptive because it could prevent unimportant external events from disrupting an internal train of thought. Here, we use measurements of pupil diameter (PD) to provide concrete evidence for the role of decoupling during spontaneous cognitive activity. First, during periods conducive to offline thought but not during periods of task focus, PD exhibited spontaneous activity decoupled from task events. Second, periods requiring external task focus were characterized by large task evoked changes in PD; in contrast, encoding failures were preceded by episodes of high spontaneous baseline PD activity. Finally, high spontaneous PD activity also occurred prior to only the slowest 20% of correct responses, suggesting high baseline PD indexes a distinct mode of cognitive functioning. Together, these data are consistent with the decoupling hypothesis, which suggests that the capacity for spontaneous cognitive activity depends upon minimizing disruptions from the external world.
The default mode network (DMN) is a set of brain regions that consistently shows higher activity at rest compared to tasks requiring sustained focused attention toward externally presented stimuli. The cognitive processes that the DMN possibly underlies remain a matter of debate. It has alternately been proposed that DMN activity reflects unfocused attention toward external stimuli or the occurrence of internally generated thoughts. The present study aimed at clarifying this issue by investigating the neural correlates of the various kinds of conscious experiences that can occur during task performance. Four classes of conscious experiences (i.e., being fully focused on the task, distractions by irrelevant sensations/perceptions, interfering thoughts related to the appraisal of the task, and mind-wandering) that varied along two dimensions ("task-relatedness" and "stimulus-dependency") were sampled using thought-probes while the participants performed a go/no-go task. Analyses performed on the intervals preceding each probe according to the reported subjective experience revealed that both dimensions are relevant to explain activity in several regions of the DMN, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, and posterior inferior parietal lobe. Notably, an additive effect of the two dimensions was demonstrated for midline DMN regions. On the other hand, lateral temporal regions (also part of the DMN) were specifically related to stimulus-independent reports. These results suggest that midline DMN regions underlie cognitive processes that are active during both internal thoughts and external unfocused attention. They also strengthen the view that the DMN can be fractionated into different subcomponents and reveal the necessity to consider both the stimulus-dependent and the task-related dimensions of conscious experiences when studying the possible functional roles of the DMN.
During concentration tasks, spontaneous attention shifts occurs towards self-centered matters. Little is known about the brain oscillatory activity underlying these mental phenomena. We recorded 128-channels electroencephalographic activity from 12 subjects performing a breath-counting task. Subjects were instructed to press a button whenever, based on their introspective experience, they realized their attention had drifted away from the task. Theta (4-7 Hz) and delta (2-3.5 Hz) EEG activity increased during mind wandering whereas alpha (9-11 Hz) and beta (15-30 Hz) decreased. A passive auditory oddball protocol was presented to the subjects to test brain-evoked responses to perceptual stimuli during mind wandering. Mismatch negativity evoked at 100 ms after oddball stimuli onset decreased during mind wandering whereas the brain-evoked responses at 200 ms after stimuli onset increased. Spectral analyses and evoked related potential results suggest decreased alertness and sensory processing during mind wandering. To our knowledge, our experiment is one of the first neuro-imaging studies that relies purely on subjects' introspective judgment, and shows that such judgment may be used to contrast different brain activity patterns.
We review evidence for partially segregated networks of brain areas that carry out different attentional functions. One system, which includes parts of the intraparietal cortex and superior frontal cortex, is involved in preparing and applying goal-directed (top-down) selection for stimuli and responses. This system is also modulated by the detection of stimuli. The other system, which includes the temporoparietal cortex and inferior frontal cortex, and is largely lateralized to the right hemisphere, is not involved in top-down selection. Instead, this system is specialized for the detection of behaviourally relevant stimuli, particularly when they are salient or unexpected. This ventral frontoparietal network works as a 'circuit breaker' for the dorsal system, directing attention to salient events. Both attentional systems interact during normal vision, and both are disrupted in unilateral spatial neglect.
Evidence indicates that the degree to which attention can be maintained upon the task in hand depends upon both the type and duration of the task. Two experiments investigated the relationship between task irrelevant thinking and block duration in two types of task. In Experiment One, a vigilance task was compared to a fluency task and in Experiment Two a verbal encoding task was compared to a fluency task. In both tasks we investigated the hypothesis that block duration mediated changes in thinking would be smallest for tasks which rely heavily on controlled processing (the fluency task). Results were consistent with expectations and indicated that the report of thoughts with no relationship to the task in hand increased with block duration in the vigilance task (Experiment One) and the verbal encoding task (Experiment Two). In neither experiment did block length effect thinking during the fluency task. These results are broadly consistent with the assertion that tasks that cannot be readily automated, maintain attention upon the task at hand in a superior fashion as the duration of the block increases. The implications of these results for our understanding of the process responsible for our conscious awareness of a stimulus and our ability to plan and anticipate events are discussed.
When not engaged in demanding tasks, we commonly experience streams of thoughts and images quite unrelated to immediate sensory input. Such stimulus-independent (SI) thoughts may be troublesome, as in worry, insomnia and depression.Previous research within a working memory paradigm suggested that SI thought production depended on central executive control resources. To explore this hypothesis further, we examined the interference with SI thought production resulting from shadowing auditorily presented digits compared to remembering them. Effects of stimulus presentation rate and size of memory load were also examined. At slow presentation rates, remembering produced more interference than shadowing. For shadowing, faster presentation produced greater interference than slow presentation. In remembering, interference was not substantially affected by size of memory load, was greater when subjects reported greater awareness of task stimuli, and was restricted to thoughts forming parts of connected sequences.The results are consistent with the view that production of connected sequences of SI thoughts depends on central executive control resources, that tasks interfere with thoughts to the extent that they make continuous demands on these resources, and that high subjective awareness of task stimuli is a marker that these resources are deployed to task management rather than thought production. The results are not consistent with Antro-bus' view that interference with SI thoughts by tasks is simply a function of the rate of processing information from external sources required by the task.
29 undergraduates carrying a beeper for 7 days described properties of their consciousness on a total of 1,425 occasions by means of a thought-sampling questionnaire, anxiety and depression measures, and activity report forms. Intra-S analyses of thought variables identified 8 orthogonal factors: Visual Modality, Auditory Modality, Operantness, Attentiveness to External Stimulation, Controllability, Strangeness, Past Time Orientation, and Future Time Orientation. Most thought samples contained some interior monologue largely independent of other variables. The visual modality predominated for most individuals. Approximately one-third of thought was predominantly undirected, one-third was stimulus-independent, and about one-quarter contained at least traces of dream-like elements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In "Losing Control," the authors provide a single reference source with comprehensive information on general patterns of self-regulation failure across contexts, research findings on specific self-control disorders, and commentary on the clinical and social aspects of self-regulation failure. Self-control is discussed in relation to what the "self" is, and the cognitive, motivational, and emotional factors that impinge on one's ability to control one's "self." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examined the influence of acute alcohol on attentional lapses whilst performing a sustained attention task (SART). The sample consisted of 17 male and seven females. A dose of alcohol achieving 80mg/100ml was administered to subjects before completion of the task. Alcohol led participants to make more errors as the session progressed and report a greater incidence of mind wandering. Importantly, alcohol reduced individuals' ability to recover from a lapse in attention. Although the sample size is small, the study did enable us to gain insight into the detrimental effects of acute alcohol ingestion on mind wandering. The authors anticipate that through the use of thought probes in the context of the SART and a larger sample size, we hope to shed further light on this phenomenon.
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the threat of a negative stereotype increases the frequency of mind-wandering (i.e., task-unrelated thought), thereby leading to performance impairments. Study 1 demonstrated that participants anticipating a stereotype-laden test mind-wandered more during the Sustained Attention to Response Task. Study 2 assessed mind-wandering directly using thought sampling procedures during a demanding math test. Results revealed that individuals experiencing stereotype threat experienced more off-task thoughts, which accounted for their poorer test performance compared to a control condition. These studies highlight the important role that social forces can have on mind-wandering. More specifically, these results serve as evidence for task-unrelated thought as a novel mechanism for stereotype threat-induced performance impairments.
Insufficient attention to tasks can result in slips of action as automatic, unintended action sequences are triggered inappropriately. Such slips arise in part from deficits in sustained attention, which are particularly likely to happen following frontal lobe and white matter damage in traumatic brain injury (TBI). We present a reliable laboratory paradigm that elicits such slips of action and demonstrates high correlations between the severity of brain damage and relative-reported everyday attention failures in a group of 34 TBI patients. We also demonstrate significant correlations between self-and informant-reported everyday attentional failures and performance on this paradigm in a group of 75 normal controls. The paradigm (the Sustained Attention to Response Task—SART) involves the withholding of key presses to rare (one in nine) targets. Performance on the SART correlates significantly with performance on tests of sustained attention, but not other types of attention, supporting the view that this is indeed a measure of sustained attention. We also show that errors (false presses) on the SART can be predicted by a significant shortening of reaction times in the immediately preceding responses, supporting the view that these errors are a result of `drift' of controlled processing into automatic responding consequent on impaired sustained attention to task. We also report a highly significant correlation of −0.58 between SART performance and Glasgow Coma Scale Scores in the TBI group.
When the mind wanders to unrelated thoughts and feelings while reading, the eyes often continue to scan the words without due attention to their meaning. This mindless reading, similar to states such as daydreaming or absentminded lapses, is a state of decoupled processing in which attention to ongoing perceptual information is reduced often in favor of the active consideration of internally generated thoughts and feelings. Normal reading involves a complex interaction between bottom-up representations of the text that is being read and top-down representations of the more general context that help to keep the readers mind on what they are doing. Since states of decoupling involve a reduced processing of sensory information, the coupling between the reader and the text breaks down during mindless reading. This reduced external coupling is one reason why mind-wandering during reading has significant implications for reading comprehension. Following the presentation of a model of the decoupled state and a specific consideration of mind-wandering during reading, five key unresolved issues for future research in mindless reading are identified.
The two core assumptions of the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control during reading are that: (1) a preliminary stage of lexical access (i.e., the familiarity check) triggers the initiation of a saccadic program to move the eyes from one word to ...
Evidence suggests that mind wandering is a frequent accompaniment to an unhappy mood. Building on such work, two laboratory experiments used mood induction to assess whether the greater frequency of mind wandering in a low mood is also accompanied by a shift towards a focus on events from the past. Experiment 1 induced moods via video and induction of an unhappy mood was associated with a greater tendency for past-related mind wandering as measured by a post-task questionnaire. In Experiment 2, negative and positive moods were induced in a group of participants using the Velten mood-induction procedure and the temporal focus of mind wandering was measured using experience sampling probes. Analyses indicated that induction of an unhappy mood led to an increase in past-related mind wandering and the magnitude of this change increased with scores on a measure of depressive symptoms. Together these experiments suggest that when the mind wanders in an unhappy mood it is drawn to events from its past.
Recent real-time fMRI (rt-fMRI) training studies have demonstrated that subjects can achieve improved control over localized brain regions by using real-time feedback about the level of fMRI signal in these regions. It has remained unknown, however, whether subjects can gain control over anterior prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions that support some of the most complex forms of human thought. In this study, we used rt-fMRI training to examine whether subjects can learn to regulate the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), or the lateral part of the anterior PFC, by using a meta-cognitive awareness strategy. We show that individuals can achieve improved regulation over the level of fMRI signal in their RLPFC by turning attention towards or away from their own thoughts. The ability to achieve improved modulation was contingent on observing veridical real-time feedback about the level of RLPFC activity during training; a sham-feedback control group demonstrated no improvement in modulation ability and neither did control subjects who received no rt-fMRI feedback but underwent otherwise identical training. Prior to training, meta-cognitive awareness was associated with recruitment of anterior PFC subregions, including both RLPFC and medial PFC, as well as a number of other midline and posterior cortical regions. Following training, however, regulation improvement was specific to RLPFC and was not observed in other frontal, midline, or parietal cortical regions. These results demonstrate the feasibility of acquiring control over high-level prefrontal regions through rt-fMRI training and offer a novel view into the correspondence between observable neuroscientific measures and highly subjective mental states.
We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people
are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically
makes them unhappy.