Journal ArticleDOI
The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review
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TLDR
Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering may play a crucial role in both autobiographical planning and creative problem solving, thus providing at least two possible adaptive functions of the phenomenon.Abstract:
Substantial evidence suggests that mind-wandering typically occurs at a significant cost to performance. Mind-wandering-related deficits in performance have been observed in many contexts, most notably reading, tests of sustained attention, and tests of aptitude. Mind-wandering has been shown to negatively impact reading comprehension and model building, impair the ability to withhold automatized responses, and disrupt performance on tests of working memory and intelligence. These empirically identified costs of mind-wandering have led to the suggestion that mind-wandering may represent a pure failure of cognitive control and thus pose little benefit. However, emerging evidence suggests that the role of mind-wandering is not entirely pernicious. Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering may play a crucial role in both autobiographical planning and creative problem solving, thus providing at least two possible adaptive functions of the phenomenon. This article reviews these observed costs and possible functions of mind-wandering and identifies important avenues of future inquiry.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research.
TL;DR: It is argued that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and full-body illusions has the potential to make decisive future contributions, and a list of potentially innovative research goals are specified that could serve to establish a stronger connection between dream research and philosophy of mind.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mindfulness training for adolescents: A neurodevelopmental perspective on investigating modifications in attention and emotion regulation using event-related brain potentials
TL;DR: Possible indexes of mindfulness-based change in adolescence, with a focus on event-related brain potential (ERP) markers, are outlined and advantages of the ERP methodology in neurodevelopmental research of mindfulness are highlighted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Conceptualising creativity benefits of nature experience : Attention restoration and mind wandering as complementary processes
Kathryn J.H. Williams,Kate Lee,Terry Hartig,Leisa D. Sargent,Nicholas S.G. Williams,Katherine A Johnson +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate two candidate mechanisms, Attention Researcher and AttentionResearcher, to find out how time spent in natural environments promotes creativity, but few researchers have considered how this occurs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Role of triggers and dysphoria in mind-wandering about past, present and future: A laboratory study.
TL;DR: The frequency and temporal focus of task unrelated thoughts about past, present, and future was compared in dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants, suggesting that some findings from IAM research regarding cues and the impact of dysphoria may be generalizable to mind-wandering.
Proceedings Article
The Eyes Have It: Gaze-based Detection of Mind Wandering during Learning with an Intelligent Tutoring System.
TL;DR: Eye-gaze and contextual information is used to build an automated MW detector as students interact with GuruTutor, an intelligent tutoring system for biology, and the results were obtained with an evolutionary approach to develop topologies for neural network classifiers.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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TL;DR: The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined.
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A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
TL;DR: The iPhone Hap App reveals that wandering thoughts lead to unhappiness and that doing so typically makes people unhappy.
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'Oops!': performance correlates of everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured and normal subjects
TL;DR: It is shown that errors on the SART can be predicted by a significant shortening of reaction times in the immediately preceding responses, supporting the view that these errors are a result of 'drift' of controlled processing into automatic responding consequent on impaired sustained attention to task.
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The restless mind
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the hypothesis that mind-wandering can be integrated into standard executive models of attention and show that it often occurs in the absence of explicit intention.
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Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering
TL;DR: Cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching consequences, and improves both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity.