Mind Wandering Content Research Articles

Costs over benefits: mind wandering in sporting performance.

Athletes' mind wandering during competition has positive and negative effects. The purpose of this study was to explore the reason for these bidirectional effects. We recruited 51 athletes from China to take part in semi-structured interviews in which we explored their experiences of mind wandering in competition. We used grounded theory combined with systems thinking to complete the data analysis and theoretical construction. Results showed that the influence of mind wandering on sporting performance was dynamically influenced by "mind wandering source," "competition anxiety," "content of mind wandering," "attentional resources" and "attentional control," resulting in our development of the theory of "mind wandering in sporting performance (MWSP)." The above factors determine how mind wandering occurs and how it affects the competition. Although the occurrence of mind wandering during competition has positive effects, its negative effects cannot be ignored, which may lead to athletes losing the race (costs over benefits). Potential strategies focusing on the mitigation of negative effects and promotion of positive effects of mind wandering are discussed.

The impact of mood-induction on maladaptive thinking in the vulnerability for depression

Background and objectivesMind-wandering, and specifically the frequency and content of mind-wandering, plays an important role in the psychological well-being of individuals. Repetitive negative thinking has been associated with a high risk to develop and maintain Major Depressive Disorder. We here combined paradigms and techniques from cognitive sciences and experimental clinical psychology to study the transdiagnostic psychiatric phenomenon of repetitive negative thinking. This allowed us to investigate the adjustability of the content and characteristics of mind-wandering in individuals varying in their susceptibility to negative affect. MethodsParticipants high (n = 42) or low (n = 40) on their vulnerability for negative affect and depression performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) after a single session of positive fantasizing and a single session of stress induction in a cross-over design. Affective states were measured before and after the interventions. ResultsAfter stress, negative affect increased, while after fantasizing both positive affect increased and negative affect decreased. Thoughts were less off-task, past-related and negative after fantasizing compared to after stress. Individuals more susceptible to negative affect showed more off-task thinking after stress than after fantasizing compared to individuals low on this. LimitationsIn this cross-over design, no baseline measurement was included, limiting comparison to ‘uninduced’ mind-wandering. Inclusion of self-related concerns in the SART could have led to negative priming. ConclusionsStress-induced negative thinking underlying vulnerability for depression could be partially countered by fantasizing in a non-clinical sample, which may inform the development of treatments for depression and other disorders characterized by maladaptive thinking.

Mind-wandering during contemporary live music: An exploratory study

During a live concert, the mind can wander to unrelated thoughts such as personal concerns or past memories or to vivid images that are inspired by the music. This is an omnipresent phenomenon commonly referred to as mind-wandering. Psychological research on mind-wandering has explored its main characteristics, such as frequency, phenomenology, and impact on mood, both in the laboratory and in daily life contexts. This study aimed to harness the ecological setting of a live music concert to examine the occurrence and content of mind-wandering, as well as visual mental imagery as a mode through which mind-wandering occurs, and its relationship with the concertgoers’ moods before and after the music event. A self-report questionnaire ( n = 43) was used to collect data at two concerts of ambient music given as part of the CTM Festival. Findings suggest that mind-wandering occurs extensively in a concert environment. While mind-wandering episodes feature negative themes and moods—in the form of dark content of the visual mental imagery associated with the program’s musical tone—the concert environment still contributes to participants feeling more inspired afterward. Overall, this study points to the potential of live music contexts to stimulate a beneficial style of mind-wandering (i.e., one that leads to a positive impact on mood and imagery), and its findings are in line with those of previous research showing that live concerts lead to increased well-being of concertgoers. Implications for well-being and a call for more systematic research on this subject are discussed.

Is a wandering mind a sign of aging?

Mind wandering occupies an essential part of our awakened life and concerns all spontaneous thoughts unrelated to an ongoing activity. Laboratory research has studied this mental state during the execution of specific tasks measuring the conditions of emergence, the frequency and content of spontaneous thoughts and the consequences, usually harmful, on the performances tested. This mini review aims to define the phenomenon, expose the prejudices on performance and the assets of the wandering mind, and present the literature on the effects of cognitive aging on the incidence and characteristics of mind wandering. Various studies have shown a reduction in task-unrelated thoughts in the elderly, combined with an increase in task-related interfering thoughts. Some explanations are proposed, such as reducing cognitive resources or increasing motivation in the context of normal aging. The content of mind wandering seems crucial to understanding how this phenomenon evolves in aging. Hence, in future research, an assessment of the characteristics of the thoughts (emotion, temporality, association with stimuli, etc.) will deepen our knowledge of the link between mind wandering and aging.

Pleasantness of mind wandering is positively associated with focus back effort in daily life: Evidence from resting state fMRI

Despite the dynamic property of consciousness, little research has explored the characteristic of the effort in trying to focus back, in which attention is shifted from mind wandering to ongoing activities. In the current study, we assessed the frequency of daily mind wandering, the pleasantness of daily mind wandering content, and the daily focus back effort of 69 participants, and then collected their resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) scans. Our results revealed that (1) participants who experienced more daily pleasant mind wandering tended to have higher effort in trying to focus back than individuals with less pleasant mind wandering whereas there were no significant relations between pleasantness of mind wandering and mind wandering frequency or between focus back effort and mind wandering frequency in everyday life; (2) the pleasantness of mind wandering and focus back effort were associated with two functional connectivity that related to focus back episodes (right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-right middle frontal gyrus, right inferior parietal - right middle frontal gyrus). The nodes forming these functional connections belonged to the executive network. Taken together, these findings support the content regulation hypothesis that humans maintain their minds wandering away from unpleasant topics by engaging in executive control processes.

An exploratory analysis of individual differences in mind wandering content and consistency.

We conducted an exploratory study of adult individual differences in the contents of mind-wandering experiences and in the moment-to-moment consistency of that off-task thought content within tasks. This secondary analysis of a published dataset (Kane et al., 2016) examined the content-based thought reports that 472–541 undergraduates made within five probed tasks across three sessions, and tested whether executive-control abilities (working memory capacity, attention-restraint ability), or personality dimensions of schizotypy (positive, disorganized, negative), predicted particular contents of task-unrelated thought (TUT) or the (in)stability of TUT content across successive thought reports. Latent-variable models indicated trait-like consistency in both TUT content and short-term TUT-content stability across tasks and sessions; some subjects mind-wandered about some things more than others, and some subjects were more temporally consistent in their TUT content than were others. Higher executive control was associated with more evaluative thoughts about task performance and fewer thoughts about current physical or emotional states; higher positive and disorganized schizotypy was associated with more fantastical-daydream and worry content. Contrary to expectations, executive ability correlated positively with TUT instability: higher-ability students had more shifting and varied TUT content within a task. Post hoc analysis suggested that better executive control predicted inconsistent TUT content because it also predicted shorter streaks of mind-wandering; tuning back in to task-related thought may decouple trains of off-task thought and afford novel spontaneous or cued thought content. [Data, sample analysis scripts and output, and article preprint are available via the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/guhw7/].

Supplemental Material for An Exploratory Analysis of Individual Differences in Mind Wandering Content and Consistency

Supplemental Material for An Exploratory Analysis of Individual Differences in Mind Wandering Content and Consistency

Revealing the Content of Mind Wandering as related to Creativity and Mental Health through Experience Sampling Method

Revealing the Content of Mind Wandering as related to Creativity and Mental Health through Experience Sampling Method

Age-related differences in mind-wandering in daily life.

In recent years, several laboratory studies have indicated that healthy older adults exhibit a reduction in mind-wandering frequency compared with young adults. However, it is unclear if these findings extend to daily life settings. In the current study, using experience sampling over the course of a week in the daily life of 31 young and 20 older adults, we assessed age-related differences in: (a) mind-wandering frequency, (b) the relationship between affect and mind-wandering frequency, and (c) content of mind wandering. Older adults mind wandered less than young adults in daily life. Across age groups, negative affect was positively associated with mind-wandering occurrence. Finally, older adults reported that their thoughts were more pleasant, interesting, and clear compared with young adults, who had thoughts that were more dreamlike, novel, strange, and racing. Our results provide the first demonstration using thought sampling that older adults exhibit a reduction in mind-wandering frequency in daily life. Implications for current theories of age-related reductions in mind-wandering frequency are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mind-Wandering in People with Hippocampal Damage.

Subjective inner experiences, such as mind-wandering, represent the fundaments of human cognition. Although the precise function of mind-wandering is still debated, it is increasingly acknowledged to have influence across cognition on processes such as future planning, creative thinking, and problem-solving and even on depressive rumination and other mental health disorders. Recently, there has been important progress in characterizing mind-wandering and identifying the associated neural networks. Two prominent features of mind-wandering are mental time travel and visuospatial imagery, which are often linked with the hippocampus. People with selective bilateral hippocampal damage cannot vividly recall events from their past, envision their future, or imagine fictitious scenes. This raises the question of whether the hippocampus plays a causal role in mind-wandering and, if so, in what way. Leveraging a unique opportunity to shadow people (all males) with bilateral hippocampal damage for several days, we examined, for the first time, what they thought about spontaneously, without direct task demands. We found that they engaged in as much mind-wandering as control participants. However, whereas controls thought about the past, present, and future, imagining vivid visual scenes, hippocampal damage resulted in thoughts primarily about the present comprising verbally mediated semantic knowledge. These findings expose the hippocampus as a key pillar in the neural architecture of mind-wandering and also reveal its impact beyond episodic memory, placing it at the heart of our mental life.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans tend to mind-wander ∼30–50% of their waking time. Two prominent features of this pervasive form of thought are mental time travel and visuospatial imagery, which are often associated with the hippocampus. To examine whether the hippocampus plays a causal role in mind-wandering, we examined the frequency and phenomenology of mind-wandering in patients with selective bilateral hippocampal damage. We found that they engaged in as much mind-wandering as controls. However, hippocampal damage changed the form and content of mind-wandering from flexible, episodic, and scene based to abstract, semanticized, and verbal. These findings expose the hippocampus as a key pillar in the neural architecture of mind-wandering and reveal its impact beyond episodic memory, placing it at the heart of our mental life.

Mind Wandering and Apperception: A Pilot Study

The present study explores the possibility of mind wandering content analysis as an effective tool for understanding the components of personality like desires, conflicts, emotions and defenses. Here the researcher intends to analyze five participants’ content of mind wandering and compare it with the results of the Thematic Apperception Test.Purposive sampling technique was used to collect data. The participants completed the procedures for the mind wandering experiment and Thematic Apperception Test as prescribed in the manual. The data from these participants have been analyzed and interpreted The results obtained from the two techniques were parallel in more than one area. Desires or needs and conflicts have the most similarity and is very prominent whereas defenses have the least similarity and is the least prominent. Thus Mind Wandering Content Analysis as Thematic Apperception Test can be a swift and effective method to better and quicker understand the desires, needs and conflicts of an individual which facilitate an overall understanding of a personality.

Daydream Believer: Rumination, Self-Reflection and the Temporal Focus of Mind Wandering Content.

Current research into mind-wandering is beginning to acknowledge that this process is one of heterogeneity. Following on from previous findings highlighting the role of self-focus during mind wandering, the present study aimed to examine individual differences in rumination and self-reflection and the impact such styles of self-focus may have on mind-wandering experiences. Thirty-three participants were required to complete the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART), aimed at inducing mind-wandering episodes, whilst also probing the content of thought in terms of temporal focus. Self-report questionnaires were also administered after the SART to measure dispositional differences in style and beliefs regarding mind-wandering and assessments of individual differences in rumination and self-reflection. Those individuals with reflective self-focus showed a strong positive association with positive and constructive thoughts. Critically, ruminative self-focus was positively associated with a tendency for the mind to wander towards anguished fantasies, failures and aggression, but it was also positively associated with positive and constructive thoughts. Furthermore, while dispositional differences in self-focus showed no relationship with the temporal perspective of thoughts when probed during a cognitive task, performance on the task itself was related to whether participants were thinking about the past, present or future during that activity. Such findings are discussed in line with previous research, and provide a further step towards accounting for the heterogeneous nature of mind-wandering.

Stereotype threat as a trigger of mind-wandering in older adults.

Older adults (OAs) report less overall mind-wandering than younger adults (YAs) but more task-related interference (TRI; mind-wandering about the task). The current study examined TRI while manipulating older adults' performance-related concerns. We compared groups for which memory-related stereotype threat (ST) was activated or relieved to a control group. Participants completed an operation span task containing mind-wandering probes. ST-activated OAs reported more TRI than ST-relieved OAs and had worse performance on the operation span task. This study illustrates that environmental context triggers current concerns and determines, in part, the frequency and content of mind-wandering. (PsycINFO Database Record

Where is My Mind? Theorizing Mind Wandering and Its Performance-Related Consequences in Organizations

Although it is widely recognized that the human mind is prone to wander, some lines of research suggest that this tendency is costly and unfortunate, whereas others suggest that mind wandering is beneficial and adaptive. Accounting for these divergent perspectives and developing theory on mind wandering, I explore the nature and performance-related consequences of mind wandering in organizations. To this end, I argue that whether mind wandering contributes to or compromises task performance over time in work settings depends on its content—that is, the specific types of thoughts workers tend to generate as their minds wander. In making this case, I theorize relationships between various types of mind wandering content and task performance over time, specify mechanisms accounting for these relationships, and consider job-related boundary conditions. Together, the arguments presented here advance and reorient research on mind wandering and open new windows into cognition in organizations.

Goal-Directed, Spontaneous, and Stimulus-Independent Thoughts and Mindwandering in a Competitive Context

The aim of this study was to analyze the functions of goal-directed thoughts and the content of spontaneous and stimulus-independent thoughts and mindwandering in a competitive setting and to explore links between different types of thoughts. Therefore, 17 young sport science students competed in a card-sorting task, while their recorded thoughts were collected between trials. Afterwards, the participants classified their own transcripts into different types of thoughts. The results indicated that goal-directed thinking serves a variety of functions, that spontaneous thought content might reflect a series of psychological states and processes relevant for performance, and that the content of mindwandering was idiosyncratic. Moreover, goal-directed thinking increased during competition, whereas mindwandering diminished. Lastly, mindwandering was rarely connected to other types of thinking, whereas the most recurrent connection between thoughts was found between goal-directed and spontaneous thinking.

Shaped by our thoughts – A new task to assess spontaneous cognition and its associated neural correlates in the default network

Self-generated cognition, or mind wandering, refers to the quintessentially human tendency to withdraw from the immediate external environment and engage in internally driven mentation. This thought activity is suggested to be underpinned by a distributed set of regions in the brain, referred to as the default network. To date, experimental assessment of mind wandering has typically taken place during performance of a concurrent attention-demanding task. The attentional demands of concurrent tasks can influence the emergence of mind wandering, and their application to clinical disorders with reduced cognitive resources is limited. Furthermore, few paradigms have investigated the phenomenological content of mind wandering episodes. Here, we present data from a novel thought sampling task that measures both the frequency and qualitative content of mind wandering, in the absence of a concurrent task to reduce cognitive demand. The task was validated in a non-pathological cohort of 31 older controls and resting-state functional connectivity analyses in a subset of participants (n=18) was conducted to explore the neural bases of mind wandering. Overall, instances of mind wandering were found to occur in 37% of experimental trials. Resting state functional connectivity analyses confirmed that mind wandering frequency was associated with regional patterns of both increased and decreased default network connectivity, namely in the temporal lobe, posterior cingulate cortex and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. Our findings demonstrate that the novel task provides a context of low cognitive demand, which is conducive to mind wandering. Furthermore, performance on the task is associated with specific patterns of functional connectivity in the default network. Together, this new paradigm offers an important avenue to investigate the frequency and content of mind wandering in the context of low cognitive demands, and has significant potential to be applied in clinical conditions with reduced cognitive resources.

Concern-induced negative affect is associated with the occurrence and content of mind-wandering

Previous research has shown that the content and frequency of mind-wandering episodes--the occurrence of thoughts that are both stimulus-independent and task-unrelated--are closely related to an individual's future-related concerns. Whether this relationship is shaped by the affective changes that are usually associated with future-related concerns still remains unclear, however. In this study, we induced the anticipation of a negatively valenced event and examined whether the ensuing affective changes were related to the occurrence and content of mind-wandering during an unrelated attentional task. We found that the increase in negative affect following concern induction predicted the general frequency of mind-wandering episodes. Furthermore, mind-wandering episodes specifically directed at the induced concern were related to a lower decrease in negative affect during the attentional task. These results suggest that the negative emotional impact of future-related concerns is an important factor to be taken into consideration for the subsequent occurrence of mind-wandering episodes, which might in turn be involved in the maintenance of negative affect over time.

Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering

Given that as much as half of human thought arises in a stimulus independent fashion, it would seem unlikely that such thoughts would play no functional role in our lives. However, evidence linking the mind-wandering state to performance decrement has led to the notion that mind-wandering primarily represents a form of cognitive failure. Based on previous work showing a prospective bias to mind-wandering, the current study explores the hypothesis that one potential function of spontaneous thought is to plan and anticipate personally relevant future goals, a process referred to as autobiographical planning. The results confirm that the content of mind-wandering is predominantly future-focused, demonstrate that individuals with high working memory capacity are more likely to engage in prospective mind-wandering, and show that prospective mind-wandering frequently involves autobiographical planning. Together this evidence suggests that mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives.