Philosophical foundations for mind-wandering science
+ Zachary C. Irving, Catherine McGrath, Lauren Flynn, Aaron Glasser, and Caitlin Mills (2023) "The Shower Effect: Mind-Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation During Moderately Engaging Activities" Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
People often seem to generate creative ideas during moderately engaging activities, such as showing or walking. One explanation of this “shower effect” is that idea generation requires a balance between focused, linear thinking (which limits originality) and unbounded, random associations (which are rarely useful). Activities like walking may help us strike this balance by allowing mind-wandering in an engaging environment that places some constrains on thought. Although past studies have found an inconsistent relationship between mind-wandering and creative idea generation, they have two limitations. First, creativity researchers have not studied the paradigmatic form of mind-wandering: freely-moving thought. Second, studies have used boring tasks that may encourage unconstrained and unproductive mind-wandering. To overcome these limitations, we investigate the relationship between idea generation and freely-moving mind-wandering during boring versus engaging video tasks. Across two studies, we find that mind-wandering leads to more creative ideas during engaging activities. Boring activities lead to either more or more semantically distant ideas overall, but these effects are unrelated to mind-wandering. Boring activities may therefore lead to ideas by affording time for focused problem solving, whereas engaging activities may do so by encouraging productive mind-wandering.
+ Samuel Murray, Zachary C Irving, and Kristina Krasich (2022) "The Scientific Study of Passive Thinking: The Methodology of Mind-Wandering Research" in De Brigard and Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.) Philosophy & Neuroscience MIT Press
The science of mind-wandering has rapidly expanded over the past 20 years. During this boom, mind-wandering researchers have relied on self-report methods, where participants rate whether their minds were wandering. This is not an historical quirk. Rather, we argue that self-report is indispensable for researchers who study passive phenomena like mind-wandering. As a case study, we consider purportedly "objective" methods that measure mind-wandering with eye tracking and machine learning. These measures are validated in terms of how well they predict self-reports, which means that purportedly objective measures of mind wandering retain a subjective core. Mind-wandering science cannot break from the cycle of self-report. Skeptics about self-report might conclude that mind-wandering science has methodological foundations of sand. We take a rather more optimistic view. We present empirical and philosophical reasons to be confident in self-reports about mind-wandering. Empirically, these self-reports are remarkably consistent in their contents and behavioural and neural correlates. Philosophically, self-reports are consistent with our best theories about the function of mind-wandering. We argue that this triangulation gives us reason to trust both theory and method.
+ Julia Kam, Zachary C. Irving, Caitlin Mills, Alison Gopnik, and Robert T Knight (2021) "Distinct Electrophysiological Signatures of Task-Unrelated and Dynamic Thought" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Humans spend much of their lives engaging with their internal train of thoughts. Traditionally, research focused on whether these thoughts are related to tasks or not, and have identified reliable but distinct behavioural and neural correlates of task-unrelated and task-related thought. A recent theoretical framework highlighted a different aspect of thinking – how it dynamically moves between topics. However, the neural correlates of such thought dynamics are unknown. The current study aimed to determine the electrophysiological signatures of these dynamics by recording EEG while participants performed an attention task, and periodically answered thought sampling questions about whether their thoughts were 1) task-unrelated, 2) freely moving, 3) deliberately constrained, and 4) automatically constrained. We examined three EEG measures across different time windows as a function of each thought type: stimulus-evoked P3 event-related potentials, and non-stimulus evoked alpha power and variability. Parietal P3 was larger for task-related relative to task-unrelated thoughts, whereas frontal P3 was increased for deliberately constrained compared to unconstrained thoughts. Frontal electrodes showed enhanced alpha power for freely moving thoughts relative to non-freely moving thoughts. Alpha power variability was increased for task-unrelated, freely moving, and unconstrained thoughts. Our findings indicate distinct electrophysiological patterns associated with task-unrelated and dynamic thoughts, suggesting these neural measures capture the heterogeneity of our ongoing thoughts.
+ Zachary C Irving, Aaron Glasser, Alison Gopnik, Chandra Sripada (2020) “What Does ‘Mind-Wandering’ Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation”Cognitive Science
Although mind-wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term "mind-wandering" means. Four prominent views define mind-wandering as 1) task-unrelated thought, 2) stimulus-independent thought, 3) unintentional thought, or 4) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind-wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (N=545) with vignettes that describe someone’s thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to the four major accounts of mind-wandering. Dynamics explains between four and forty times more variance in participants’ mind-wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (N=153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind-wandering. Our final study (N=277) used vignettes that resemble mind-wandering experiments. Dynamics had significant and large effects, while task-unrelatedness was non-significant. These results strongly suggest that the central feature of mind-wandering is its dynamics.
+ Caitlin Mills, Quentin Raffaelli, Zachary C Irving, Dylan Stan, Kalina Christoff "Is an off-task mind a freely-moving mind? Examining the relationship between different dimensions of thought" (2018) Consciousness and Cognition
Mind wandering is frequently defined as task-unrelated or perceptually decoupled thought. However, these definitions may not capture the dynamic features of a wandering mind, such as its tendency to 'move freely'. Here we test the relationship between three theoretically dissociable dimensions of thought: freedom of movement in thought, task-relatedness, and perceptual decoupling (i.e., lack of awareness of surroundings). Using everyday life experience sampling, thought probes were randomly delivered to participants’ phones for ten days. Results revealed weak intra-individual correlations between freedom of movement in thought and task-unrelatedness, as well as perceptual decoupling. Within our dataset, over 40% of thoughts would have been misclassified under the assumption that off-task thought is inherently freely moving. Overall, freedom of movement appears to be an independent dimension of thought that is not captured by the two most common measures of mind wandering. Future work focusing on the dynamics of thought may be crucial for improving our understanding of the wandering mind.
+ Jessica Andrews-Hanna, Kieran Fox, Zachary C Irving, Nathan Spreng, and Kalina Christoff (2018) "The Neuroscience of Spontaneous Thought: An Evolving, Interdisciplinary Field" in Christoff and Fox (Eds.) Oxford Volume on Spontaneous Thought And Creativity Oxford University Press
An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal to the processes constraining how thoughts are evoked and unfold over time. In this chapter, we emphasize the importance of incorporating such processes into current definitions of mind-wandering, and proposing that mind-wandering and other forms of spontaneous thought (such as dreaming and creativity) are mental states that arise and transition relatively freely due to an absence of constraints on cognition. We review existing psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific research on spontaneous thought through the lens of this framework, and call for additional research into the dynamic properties of the mind and brain.
+ Kalina Christoff, Caitlin Mills, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, Zachary C Irving, Evan Thompson, Kieran C. R. Fox, Julia W.Y. Kam (2018) “Mind-wandering as a scientific concept: Cutting through the definitional haze” Trends in Cognitive Science
The recent surge of scientific research into mind-wandering has occurred amidst a definitional haze. ‘Mind-wandering’ has been used to refer to a wide range of mental phenomena, from attentional lapses to purposeful, task-unrelated planning; from free-flowing thought and creative idea generationto highly constrained, perseverative rumination. Should we continue to group these disparate phenomena under the umbrella of ‘mind-wandering’ despite the lack of scientific consensus on what mindwandering is and what it is not? Or should we treat ‘mind-wandering’ as a scientific concept in need of a rigorous theoretical definition that distinguishes it from other types of thought?
+ Zachary C Irving (2018) "Psychology Off Tasks: Self-Report in the Sciences of Dreaming and Mind-Wandering" Journal of Consciousness Studies
How do you measure something so elusive as a dream or mind-wandering? I follow Windt and defend an old fashioned answer. Scientists can––indeed, they must––measure dreams with introspective self-reports, which have been in use since the inception of dream research. Yet this raises a question: what is self-report so central in research on dreams and mind-wandering? I con- sider and reject an obvious answer: dream reports are methodolgically necessary because dreams are conscious experiences. I provide an alternative, action-theoretic, explanation for the special role of dream reports. Because the onset of dreaming is not under voluntary control, subjects cannot perform voluntary experimental tasks that initiate dreaming. In lieu of experimental tasks, dream researchers rely on self-report. Dream reporting is part of a broader methodological movement that I call 'task-free psychology', whose practitioners use self-report to study passive processes like dreaming and mind-wandering. Although task-free psychology holds promise, I argue that it faces a unique problem of causal inference: without tasks, it's unclear how psychologists can perform the interventions necessary to determine the effects of dreaming or mind- wandering. Drawing on action theory and interventionist theories of causation, we can better understand the motivations and limits of task-free psychology, as well as ways that the field can progress.
+ Matt L. Dixon, Jessica Andrews-Hanna, R Nathan Spreng, Zachary C Irving, and Kalina Christoff (2017) "Interactions between the default network and dorsal attention network vary across default subsystems, time, and cognitive states" Neuroimage
Anticorrelation between the default network (DN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) is thought to be anintrinsic aspect of functional brain organization reflecting competing functions. However, the effect size offunctional connectivity (FC) between the DN and DAN has yet to be established. Furthermore, the stability ofanticorrelations across distinct DN subsystems, different contexts, and time, remains unexplored. In study 1 wesummarize effect sizes of DN-DAN FC from 20 studies, and in study 2 we probe the variability of DN-DANinteractions across six different cognitive states in a new data set. We show that: (i) the DN and DAN have anindependent rather than anticorrelated relationship when global signal regression is not used (median effectsize across studies: r=−.06; 95% CI:−.15 to .08); (ii) the DAN exhibits weak negative FC with the DN Coresubsystem but is uncorrelated with the dorsomedial prefrontal and medial temporal lobe subsystems; (iii) DN-DAN interactions vary significantly across different cognitive states; (iv) DN-DAN FCfluctuates across timebetween periods of anticorrelation and periods of positive correlation; and (v) changes across time in thestrength of DN-DAN coupling are coordinated with interactions involving the frontoparietal control network(FPCN). Overall, the observed weak effect sizes related to DN-DAN anticorrelation suggest the need to re-conceptualize the nature of interactions between these networks. Furthermore, ourfindings demonstrate thatDN-DAN interactions are not stable, but rather, exhibit substantial variability across time and context, and arecoordinated with broader network dynamics involving the FPCN.
+ Kalina Christoff, Zachary C Irving, Kieran Fox, Nathan Spreng, and Jessica Andrews-Hanna (2016) “Mind-Wandering as Spontaneous Thought: A Dynamic Framework” Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Most research on mind-wandering has characterized it as a mental state with contents that are task unrelated or stimulus independent. However, the dynamics of mind-wandering––how mental states change over time––have remained largely neglected. Here, we introduce a dynamic framework for understanding mind-wandering and its relationship to the recruitment of large-scale brain networks. We propose that mind-wandering is best understood as a member of a family of spontaneous-thought phenomena that also includes creative thought and dreaming. This dynamic framework can shed new light on mental disorders that are marked by alterations in spontaneous thought, including depression, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.