The Persistence of Thought

Tasks that tax working memory (WM) have consistently been found to decrease mind wandering. These findings may indicate that maintenance of mind wandering requires WM resources, such that mind wandering cannot persist when WM resources are being consumed by a task. An alternative explanation for these findings, however, is that mind wandering persists without the support of WM but is nonetheless decreased during any demanding task because good task performance requires that attention be restricted from task-unrelated thought (TUT). The present study tested these two competing theories by investigating whether individuals with greater WM resources mind-wander more during an undemanding task, as would be predicted only by the theory that WM supports TUT. We found that individuals with higher WM capacity reported more TUT in undemanding tasks, which suggests that WM enables the maintenance of mind wandering.

[1]  Scott T. Grafton,et al.  Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought , 2007, Science.

[2]  J. Smallwood,et al.  Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering , 2011, Consciousness and Cognition.

[3]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources , 1995, Memory & cognition.

[4]  M. Kane,et al.  Conducting the train of thought: working memory capacity, goal neglect, and mind wandering in an executive-control task. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[5]  W. M. Cox,et al.  Dimensions of Thought Flow in Everyday Life , 1987 .

[6]  R. Engle,et al.  Working memory capacity and the top-down control of visual search: Exploring the boundaries of "executive attention". , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[7]  Barry Dainton,et al.  Stream of Consciousness , 2000, Tragedy of the Commons (Poetry).

[8]  D. Gilbert,et al.  A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind , 2010, Science.

[9]  Matthew P. Gerrie,et al.  Individual differences in working memory capacity and visual search: The roles of top-down and bottom-up processing , 2007, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[10]  Jonathan Smallwood,et al.  Subjective experience and the attentional lapse: Task engagement and disengagement during sustained attention , 2004, Consciousness and Cognition.

[11]  Jonathan Smallwood,et al.  Going AWOL in the Brain: Mind Wandering Reduces Cortical Analysis of External Events , 2008, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[12]  N. Lavie,et al.  Harnessing the wandering mind: The role of perceptual load , 2009, Cognition.

[13]  E. Viding,et al.  Load theory of selective attention and cognitive control. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[14]  R. Engle,et al.  Working-memory capacity and the control of attention: the contributions of goal neglect, response competition, and task set to Stroop interference. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[15]  M. Kane,et al.  Tracking the train of thought from the laboratory into everyday life: An experience-sampling study of mind wandering across controlled and ecological contexts , 2009, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[16]  N. Lavie.  Distracted and confused?: Selective attention under load , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[17]  M. D’Esposito.  Working memory. , 2008, Handbook of clinical neurology.

[18]  Alan D. Baddeley,et al.  Working memory and stimulus-independent thought: Effects of memory load and presentation rate , 1993 .

[19]  M. Kane,et al.  Does mind wandering reflect executive function or executive failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). , 2010, Psychological bulletin.

[20]  Steve Majerus,et al.  Mind-wandering: phenomenology and function as assessed with a novel experience sampling method. , 2011, Acta psychologica.

[21]  Jonathan S. A. Carriere,et al.  Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors , 2009, Cognition.

[22]  K. Christoff,et al.  Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[23]  Jeffrey R. Binder,et al.  Interrupting the “stream of consciousness”: An fMRI investigation , 2006, NeuroImage.

[24]  Richard P. Heitz,et al.  An automated version of the operation span task , 2005, Behavior research methods.

[25]  M. Kane,et al.  Working-memory capacity predicts the executive control of visual search among distractors: The influences of sustained and selective attention , 2009, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[26]  J. Smallwood,et al.  The restless mind. , 2006, Psychological bulletin.

[27]  Steve Majerus,et al.  Neural Correlates of Ongoing Conscious Experience: Both Task-Unrelatedness and Stimulus-Independence Are Related to Default Network Activity , 2011, PloS one.

[28]  L. Giambra,et al.  A Laboratory Method for Investigating Influences on Switching Attention to Task-Unrelated Imagery and Thought , 1995, Consciousness and Cognition.

[29]  Jonathan Smallwood,et al.  When is your head at? An exploration of the factors associated with the temporal focus of the wandering mind , 2009, Consciousness and Cognition.