Lecture 5: Guest lecture The Wandering Mind: Where your attention goes when you're not looking Awake Part One - Defining Mind wandering - Measurement of Mind wandering - Functional outcomes of mind wandering Inattentive Attentive Attend Ignore DEFINING MIND WANDERING Defining Attention - A spotlight or gatekeeper that shift or focuses our resources on the external world - You can think of this as dictating where your resources go, such as you are able decide which parts of the external environment will be important. - This is a graph (right) that is often seen in the cognitive world. It describes that when you are awake, you can either be attentive or inattentive. When you are attentive, you can either attend to something or ignore something. - A lot of researchers were actually interested in the inattentive portion of this graph (in red) Defining Mind Wandering 1960's-1970's: Studied as daydreaming or fantasy styles > A lot of traditional research thought of looked at mind wandering as daydreaming. So, they didn't really think of this as a science, but more in terms of personality, imagination, and how your dreams ended up flowing through you. > There was this great foundational book by by Jerome L. Singer called the "The Inner world of Daydreaming" . It was a foundational text that looked at our subconscious thoughts. Singer thought that there were 3 core styles of daydreaming: a positive constructive style (you would engage in playful imagery and creativity), there was a more guilty/dysphoric style (you would engage in visions of failure, aggression and negative thoughts) and another style that tied in the attention control. - 1990's: Explored as the process underlying why we stray from external events (i.e. how our attention shifts and moves into other types of events -> Investigated as a stimulus independent thought. (Not tied to the outside world, but tied to these independent things that you imagine.) - Mid 2000s: Scientific Perspective applied to mind wandering > There was another foundational text by Schewer and Sicker, where they really started to talk of mind wandering as science. Mind Wandering was something that was fundamental and important to be able to study, and not only daydreams. It ended up taking away from the personality and creativity states. > What all of this research really allowed was to think of mind wandering in very different ways: i.e. types of activities mind wandering occurs in, the different instances and how often your mind tends to wander. > There was this amazing study by Killingson and Gilbert that looked at the type of activities in which mind wandering occurs. > They found that mind wandering does in fact occur across different activities (i.e. when you are working, when you are reading, even when you doing more active activities, such as praying, listening to the news or talking to a friend). They also found that mind wandering tends to occur 20-50 percent of the time during our waking hours. >Considering that mind wandering is