tasks” title=”Grand-average ERP waveforms for SART and Stroop tasks (all trials, n = 48). Credit: Compton et al. Springer, 2023″ width=”690″ height=”530″/>
Inside the Mind: Varying Nature of Mind-Wandering
When humans are completing a specific task, their minds can shift from what they are doing to their own internal thoughts. This shift of attention from a task to internal events, known as off-task thinking or mind-wandering, is a well-documented phenomenon that has been studied extensively.
A research question that remains unanswered is whether mind-wandering should be considered an adaptive/beneficial or maladaptive/undesirable process. Depending on the circumstances in which it occurs, in fact, this process could distract a person from an important task they are trying to complete or shift their attention onto something equally or more important for them.
What are the neural correlates of mind-wandering?
“This study was designed to examine how mind-wandering and its neural correlates vary across tasks with different attentional demands, motivated by the context regulation hypothesis of mind-wandering,” Rebecca J. Compton, Danylo Shudrenko, and their colleagues wrote in their paper.
Discoveries from Recent Study
To explore the modulation of mind-wandering, the researchers carried out a series of experiments involving 59 undergraduate students at Haverford College. These participants were asked to complete two distinct cognitive tasks, known as the sustained attention to response task (SART) and the Stroop selective attention task.
While participants completed these two tasks, Compton and her collaborators measured the electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
“The tasks included experience-sampling probes to identify self-reported episodes of mind-wandering,
