One mechanism that has been hypothesized to contribute to older adults' changes in cognitive performance is goal neglect or impairment in maintaining task set across time. Mind-wandering and task-unrelated thought may underlie these potential age-related changes. The present study investigated age-related changes in mind-wandering in three different versions of the Sustained Attention to Respon...

Mind wandering has been investigated in a variety of sustained attention tasks. In the present research, we investigated the role of mind wandering while listening to familiar or unfamiliar musical excerpts, and its effects on linguistic processing. Participants performed a lexical congruity task involving judging the semantic relatedness of a list of word pairs while listening to familiar clas...

We present a computational cognitive model of mind wandering, an important cognitive phenomenon whose mechanisms are involved in insight, problem-solving, and creativity. The model posits that mind wandering begins when one is not engaged in goal-oriented cognition, whether when between tasks or when in the middle of a task but not actively thinking about one’s goal. At such times, the model th...

When we get distracted, we may engage in mind-wandering, or task-unrelated thinking, which impairs performance on cognitive tasks. Yet, we do not have cognitive models that make this process explicit. On the basis of both recent experiments that have started to investigate mind-wandering and introspective knowledge from for example meditators, we built a process model of distraction in the form...

Unintentional lapses of attention, or mind wandering, are ubiquitous and detrimental during learning. Hence, automated methods that detect and combat mind wandering might be beneficial to learning. As an initial step in this direction, we propose to detect mind wandering by monitoring physiological measures of skin conductance and skin temperature. We conducted a study in which student’s physio...

Recent research has shown that mind wandering recruits executive resources away from the external task towards inner thoughts. No studies however have determined whether executive functions are drawn away in a unitary manner during mind wandering episodes, or whether there is variation in specific functions impacted. Accordingly, we examined whether mind wandering differentially modulates three...

The mechanism of the excitation of the Earth's polar instability in the absence of external torques is explored. The conventional perturbation scheme used to simplify the Liouville equation has oversimplified the excitation physics. The Earth becomes axially near-symmetrical and slightly triaxial during polar excitation, which induces additional change in the moment of inertia. Polar excitation...

Here we test the hypothesis that fluctuations in subjective reports of mind wandering over time-on-task are associated with fluctuations in performance over time-on-task. In Study 1, we employed a singleton search task and found that performance did not differ prior to on- and off-task reports, nor did individual differences in mind wandering predict differences in performance (so-called standa...