2/21/2023 0 Comments Thought train free![]() ![]() ![]() The goal of the present work was to bridge the controlled and ecological approaches to mind-wandering research by asking whether people who experience more (or fewer) TUTs during a challenging laboratory task also experience more (or fewer) TUTs in daily life. ![]() As in laboratory studies, daily-life mind wandering occurs frequently and it varies reliably with context: Subjects report TUTs at 30 – 40% of probes, overall (e.g., Klinger & Cox, 1987–88), but they occur more often during classroom lectures than discussions (e.g., Schoen, 1970), and less often during enjoyable activities and happy moods (e.g., Kane et al., 2007). Perhaps for this reason, researchers have also investigated TUTs in ecologically valid contexts, by inserting thought probes into normal classroom activities (e.g., Cameron & Giuntoli, 1972 Geerligs, 1995) or by electronically paging (“beeping”) subjects to answer questions about their thoughts, emotions, and environmental context during unconstrained daily activities (e.g., Hurlburt, 1979). Unlike some heavily investigated cognitive phenomena, however, mind wandering seems ubiquitous in everyday life. As well, individual differences in TUT rates are reliable across different primary tasks and across substantial test-retest lags ( Giambra, 1995 Grodsky & Giambra, 1990–91) and they are predicted by objective cognitive-ability assessments ( McVay & Kane, 2009). Such thought-probe responses appear to be valid: TUT reports vary systematically with experimental manipulations, such as memory load, stimulus pacing, and task practice (e.g., Antrobus, Singer, & Greenberg, 1966 Teasdale, Proctor, Lloyd, & Baddeley, 1993), TUTs show a reliable neural signature (e.g., Mason et al., 2007), and task errors can increase by 25% during TUTs versus on-task thoughts ( McVay & Kane, 2009 Schooler et al., 2004). ![]() Like most areas of cognitive investigation, mind-wandering research is dominated by laboratory and neuroimaging methods here, subjects engage an ongoing task that is periodically interrupted for them to report or categorize their current thoughts (e.g., as on- or off-task Giambra, 1995 Mason et al. It is also beginning to figure into general theories of executive control, metacognition, and the “default-mode” brain network (e.g., Bar, 2007 Buckner & Carroll, 2007 Burgess, Dumontheil, & Gilbert, 2007 Mason et al., 2007 Schooler, 2002 Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) we have argued, for example, that unwanted mind-experiences represent momentary failures of goal maintenance that reflect, in part, enduring individual differences in executive control ( Kane et al., 2007 McVay & Kane, 2009). Mind wandering thus co-occurs with events of scientific and practical interest. Moreover, despite controversy about the causal functions of consciousness (e.g., Morsella, 2005 Rosenthal, 2008 Wegner, 2002), field and laboratory studies of human performance (e.g., Reason, 1990 Smallwood et al., 2004) indicate that errors increase when people report experiencing task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). For example, the commonplace experience of moving one’s eyes across a page without comprehending a thing suggests the startling conclusion that we are sometimes unaware of our own conscious experience if we “knew” our thoughts were elsewhere, we would return to reading or drop the charade ( Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004). The study of mind wandering provides a novel means to explore fundamental issues of consciousness. The propensity to mind-wander appears to be a stable cognitive characteristic and seems to predict performance difficulties in daily life, just as it does in the laboratory. We also conceptually replicated laboratory findings that mind wandering predicts task performance: subjects rated their daily-life performance to be impaired when they reported off-task thoughts, with greatest impairment when subjects’ mind wandering lacked meta-consciousness. Subjects who reported more mind wandering during the laboratory task endorsed more mind-wandering experiences during everyday life (and were more likely to report worries as off-task thought content). In an experience-sampling study that bridged laboratory, ecological, and individual-differences approaches to mind-wandering research, 72 subjects completed an executive-control task with periodic thought probes (reported by McVay & Kane, 2009) and then carried PDAs for a week that signaled them 8 times daily to report immediately whether their thoughts were off-task. ![]()
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