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Mind wandering researchers study the stream of consciousness in everyday life. Some questions at the center of this research include: What initiates a bout of mind wandering? How effortful or free-flowing does mind wandering feel? How "useful" are the thoughts that we produce while mind wandering? Is mind wandering best defined by movement patterns or by its content?
These points of interest are fundamentally methodological questions, pointing to the need to compare existing and create new measurement systems to answer these questions. My research focuses specifically on the "thought probe" measurement of mind wandering.
In O'Neill et al. (2021) and Smith et al. (2022), we focused on how the leading operationalizations of mind wandering relate to each other, as well as to behavioral outcomes, such as creative output and psychopathological symptoms.
In Gross et al. (2020), we used mobile experience sampling to compare the phenomenological features of different forms of "stimulus-independent thought" (dreaming and mind wandering).
Traditionally, "mind wandering" is defined in a negative sense - that is, a failure to attend to the task at hand. However, a growing contingent of researchers are making strides to define mind wandering in positive terms. Mills et al. (2018), Christoff et al. (2016), and other proponents of the "Dynamic Framework of thought" describe mind wandering as thought that is dynamic; as thoughts arrive spontaneously, can land on anything, and flow with ease. In this project, we sought to connect the new focus on thought dynamics with common measures already in use in the field of mind wandering research.
To this end, we measured participants’ reports of freely moving thoughts during a cognitive task and measured creativity (divergent-thinking) performance, as well as symptoms of depression, anxiety, and OCD. Our results failed to support any of the Dynamic Framework’s predictions. In Study 2, we assessed the predicted relations between freely moving thought and divergent-thinking performance by manipulating thought constraint during a creative-incubation interval that preceded a divergent-thinking task. Here,we found some evidence (albeit very weak) to support the Dynamic Framework’s prediction. Finally, in Study 3, we examined the possibility that indexing freely moving thought during a divergent-thinking task would yield the predicted associations but failed to find support for these associations. These results, most of which are at odds with the predictions of the Dynamic Framework, suggest either the need to revise the framework and/or that current methods are inadequate to properly test these predictions.
O’Neill, K., Smith, A. P., Smilek, D., & Seli, P. (2021). Dissociating the freely-moving thought dimension of mind-wandering from the intentionality and task-unrelated thought dimensions. Psychological Research, 85, 2599-2609.
The recently forwarded family-resemblances framework of mind-wandering argues that mind-wandering is a multidimensional construct consisting of a variety of exemplars. On this view, membership in the mind-wandering family is graded along various dimensions that define more or less prototypical instances of mind-wandering. In recent work, three dimensions that have played a prominent role in defining prototypicality within the mind-wandering family include: (a) task-relatedness (i.e., how related the content of a thought is to an ongoing task), (b) intentionality (i.e., whether thought is deliberately or spontaneously engaged), and (c) thought constraint (i.e., how much attention constrains thought dynamics). One concern, however, is that these dimensions may be redundant with each other. The utility of distinguishing among these different dimensions of mind-wandering rests upon a demonstration that they are dissociable. To shed light on this issue, we indexed the task-relatedness, intentionality, and constraint dimensions of thought during the completion of a laboratory task to evaluate how these dimensions relate to each other. We found that 56% of unconstrained thoughts were “on-task” and that 23% of constrained thoughts were “off-task.” Moreover, we found that rates of off-task thought, but not “freely-moving” (i.e., unconstrained) thought, varied as a function of expected changes in task demands, confirming that task-relatedness and thought constraint are separable dimensions. Participants also reported 21% of intentional off-task thoughts that were freely moving and 9% of unintentional off-task thoughts that were constrained. Finally, off-task thoughts were more likely to be freely-moving than unintentional. Taken together, the results suggest that these three dimensions of mind-wandering are not redundant with one another.
Gross, M. E., Smith, A. P., Graveline, Y. M., Beaty, R. E., Schooler, J. W., & Seli, P. (2021). Comparing the phenomenological qualities of stimulus-independent thought, stimulus-dependent thought and dreams using experience sampling. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376(1817), 20190694.
Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in ‘stimulus-independent thoughts' (SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate external environment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven by stimuli in one's external environment (i.e. stimulus-dependent thoughts; SDTs), at times, the phenomenology of these two types of thought appears to be deceptively similar. But how similar are they? We address this question by comparing the content of two types of SIT (dreaming and waking SITs) with the content of SDTs. In this 7 day, smartphone-based experience-sampling procedure, participants were intermittently probed during the day and night to indicate whether their current thoughts were stimulus dependent or stimulus independent. They then responded to content-based items indexing the qualitative aspects of their experience (e.g. My thoughts were jumping from topic to topic). Results indicate substantial distinctiveness between these three types of thought: significant differences between at least two of the three mental states were found across every measured variable. Implications are discussed.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Offline perception: voluntary and spontaneous perceptual experiences without matching external stimulation’
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