Study suggests that neural correlates of mind wandering may vary across different tasks

When humans complete 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 well documented and has been studied extensively in the past.

A research question that remains unanswered is whether mind wandering should be considered an adaptive/beneficial or maladaptive/undesirable process. Indeed, depending on the circumstances in which it occurs, this process could distract a person from an important task they are trying to accomplish or divert their attention to something equally or more important to them.

In other words, the thoughts on which attention is focused may be unimportant and distracting, or more applicable to personally relevant goals for a specific person. Some psychology researchers have also proposed that intentional mind wandering is more adaptive, because it involves deliberately controlling one’s attention, while spontaneous mind wandering is maladaptive, because it involves failing to control one’s attention.

Researchers at Haverford College recently set out to shed light on the deliberate modulation of mind wandering. Their findings, published in Cognitive, affective and behavioral neuroscienceconfirm the hypothesis that mind wandering is sensitive to the context underlying the different tasks.

“This study was designed to examine how mind wandering and its neural correlates vary across tasks with different attention demands, motivated by the contextual regulation hypothesis of mind wandering,” wrote Rebecca J. Compton, Danylo Shudrenko and colleagues in their article. .

To explore the modulation of mind wandering, researchers conducted a series of experiments involving 59 undergraduate students at Haverford College. These participants were asked to perform two separate cognitive tasks, known as the sustained attention to response task (SART) and the Stroop selective attention task.

SART asks participants to perform movements whenever they see a stimulus, but to remain still when they see a specific stimulus that occurs rarely. The Stroop test, on the other hand, involves correctly saying out loud the color in which written words are presented on a screen, even when those words are names of colors that do not match the color of the text.

While the SART is often used to test participants’ ability to stay focused on task instructions for an extended period of time, the Stroop test assesses selective attention, or in other words the ability to focus only on one aspect of the stimuli presented (i.e., the color versus the meaning of the words). While participants completed these two tasks, Compton and colleagues measured electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalogram (EEG).

“Tasks included experience sampling surveys to identify self-reported mind wandering episodes, as well as retrospective reports,” Compton, Shudrenko, and colleagues wrote. “Participants reported more mind wandering during the SART than during the Stroop and regardless of which task was presented second during the session, compared to first.”

Of the 59 students who participated in the study, only 37 ultimately produced usable EEG data. The researchers analyzed recordings collected from these 37 study participants in conjunction with their actions during the two cognitive tasks they completed.

“Replicating previous findings, EEG data indicated increased alpha oscillations during mind wandering episodes, compared to on-task episodes, for both the SART and Stroop tasks,” said Compton, Shudrenko and their coworkers. “ERP data, focusing on the P2 component reflecting perceptual processing, revealed that mind wandering was associated with increased P2 amplitudes during the Stroop task, contrary to predictions from perceptual decoupling theory.”

The data collected by this research team confirm that mind wandering is associated with increased alpha oscillations, which has also been reported in previous work. However, contrary to theoretical predictions, the study found that mind wandering was also linked to an increase in so-called P2 amplitudes when performing the Stroop task, suggesting that executive function was increased.

Collectively, these findings suggest that the neural underpinnings of mind wandering may vary depending on the task a person is performing. This could be further explored and validated in future studies with larger experimental samples and using different imaging tools.

“Overall, the study found that self-evaluation and neural correlates of mind wandering are sensitive to task context,” the researchers added. “This line of research can deepen the understanding of how mind wandering mechanisms are adapted to varied tasks and situations.”

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