Abstract
Attentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we studied the behaviour, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants performing a task. Random interruptions prompted participants to indicate their mental states as task-focused, mind-wandering or mind-blanking. Using high-density electroencephalography, we report here that spatially and temporally localized slow waves, a pattern of neural activity characteristic of the transition toward sleep, accompany behavioural markers of lapses and preceded reports of mind wandering and mind blanking. The location of slow waves could distinguish between sluggish and impulsive behaviours, and between mind wandering and mind blanking. Our results suggest attentional lapses share a common physiological origin: the emergence of local sleep-like activity within the awake brain.
Highlights
Attentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt
They can result in a lack of responsiveness or sluggish reactions, but they can result in impulsive responses[6]. These behavioural failures can be accompanied by a lack of conscious awareness and the absence of mental activity (MB3), or rich, spontaneous mental activity (MW2). It is yet unclear whether these different types of attentional lapses belong to a disparate family of behavioural and phenomenological events[7,8], each of them associated with different physiological causes[9,10], or whether they can be traced back to common underlying physiological causes[11]
The Go/NoGo tests require participants’ sustained attention, but our participants declared focusing on the task only in ~48% of the probes (Face Task: 49.4 ± 4.9%; Digit Task: 47.2 ± 5.1%; mean ± standard error of the mean (SEM) across N = 26 participants; Fig. 1c)
Summary
Attentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. These behavioural failures can be accompanied by a lack of conscious awareness and the absence of mental activity (MB3), or rich, spontaneous mental activity (MW2) It is yet unclear whether these different types of attentional lapses (sluggish vs impulsive behaviours; MB vs MW) belong to a disparate family of behavioural and phenomenological events[7,8], each of them associated with different physiological causes[9,10], or whether they can be traced back to common underlying physiological causes[11]. Investigations of the sleep onset period (hypnagogia) indicate that subjective experiences resembling MW (focus on internally generated contents) and MB (loss of awareness) can both occur at the border between wakefulness and sleep[17,18] These studies seem to associate lapses with pressure for sleep, suggesting an involvement of fatigue
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