When humans accomplish a particular task, their minds can be transferred from what they are doing to their own internal thoughts. This shift of attention from tasks to internal events, known as off-task thinking or mind wandering, is well-documented and has been extensively studied in the past.
An unanswered research question is whether mind-wandering should be seen as an adaptive beneficial or maladaptive process. In fact, depending on what it happens, this process can distract a person from an important task they are trying to accomplish or divert attention to something that is just as or more important to them.
In other words, the thoughts to which the attention shifts may be unimportant and distracting, or more applicable to goals that are personally relevant to a particular person. Some psychology researchers have also proposed that intentional mind-wandering is more adaptive because it requires deliberate control of one's attention, while spontaneous mind-wandering is maladaptive because it requires the inability to control one's attention.
Researchers at H**Erford College recently set out to shed light on the deliberate modulation of mind wandering. Their findings, published in Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, confirm the hypothesis that mind-wandering is sensitive to the context that underpins different tasks.
This study aims to investigate how mind-wandering and its neural correlations vary in tasks with different attentional needs, which is driven by the situational regulation hypothesis of mind-wandering," Rebecca JCompton, Danylo Shudrenko and their colleagues wrote in their **.
To explore mind-wandering modulation, the researchers conducted a series of experiments involving 59 undergraduates at Haverford College. These participants were asked to complete two different cognitive tasks, called the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART) and the Stroop Selective Attention Task.
SART asks participants to exercise each time they see some stimulus, but when they see a specific stimulus that rarely happens, they stay still. The Stroop test, on the other hand, requires correctly saying aloud the colors of the written text as it appears on the screen, even if the text is a color name that doesn't match the color of the text.
While SART is commonly used to test a participant's ability to focus on task instructions for long periods of time, the Stroop test assesses selective attention, or in other words, the ability to focus on only one aspect of the stimulus presented (i.e., the color rather than the meaning of the word). As participants completed both tasks, Compton and her collaborators measured electrical activity in the brain using electroencephalography (EEG).
These tasks include empirical sampling probes to identify self-reported mind-wandering events, as well as retrospective reports," Compton, Shudlenko, and their colleagues wrote. "Participants reported more mind-wandering during the second task proposed during the session compared to the first task during the SART compared to the Stroop. ”
2023 Post Sprint Contest Of the 59 students who participated in the study, only 37 ended up producing usable EEG data. The researchers analyzed recordings collected from the 37 study participants, as well as their behavior during the two cognitive tasks they completed.
Replicating previous findings, EEG data showed that in the START and Stroop tasks, there was an increase in oscillations during mind-wandering episodes compared to task episodes," Compton, Shudrenko, and colleagues said. "The ERP data focused on the P2 component that reflects the perceptual processing, and it was found that during the Stroop task, mind wandering was associated with an increase in the P2 amplitude, which is contrary to the perception decoupling theory.
The data collected by the research team confirmed that mind wandering was associated with an increase in alpha oscillations, which had also been reported in previous work. However, contrary to the theory**, it was found that mind wandering was also associated with an increase in the so-called P2 amplitude when completing the Stroop task, suggesting an enhanced executive function.
Overall, these results suggest that the neural basis of mind wandering may vary depending on the task a person is accomplishing. This can be further explored and validated in future studies, using larger experimental samples and using different imaging tools.
Overall, the study found that the neural correlations of self-report and mind-wandering were sensitive to task context," the researchers added. "This series of studies can further understand how mind-wandering mechanisms adapt to different tasks and situations.