Self-generated cognition, or mind wandering, refers to the quintessentially human tendency to withdraw from the immediate external environment and engage in internally driven mentation. This thought activity is suggested to be underpinned by a distributed set of regions in the brain, referred to as the default network. To date, experimental assessment of mind wandering has typically taken place...

The main goal of this current study is to contribute to the cognitive Information Systems (IS) literature by examining the effect of individuals’ focus ability and mind-wandering in influencing IS task performance at different levels of task complexity. The effects of focus ability and mind-wandering on IS task performance as well as the moderating roles of IS task complexity were examined in a...

Although much research shows that early sensory and attentional processing is affected by mind wandering, the effect of mind wandering on deep (i.e. semantic) processing is relatively unexplored. To investigate this relation, we recorded event-related potentials as participants studied English-Spanish word pairs, one at a time, while being intermittently probed for whether they were 'on task' o...

Mind-wandering shares a number of important similarities with thinking in depression. This experiment examines whether mind-wandering provides a useful marker of cognition in dysphoria during a word learning task. Dysphoria was associated with more accessible mind-wandering when attempting to encode verbal items. In addition, in the dysphoric population, periods when the mind wandered led to gr...

Mind wandering often leads to performance and accuracy errors during activities that are demanding and require concentration. Students are often asked to concentrate on demanding tasks in their studies, and by the nature of this principle, off-task thinking would inherently be prohibitive to their success. Further, the distracting nature of social media and technology may greatly increase the l...

Infection with Yersinia enterocolitica (YE) typically presents with mild gastroenteritis without systemic infection. However, systemic YE infection has been described in states of iron overload. We present the case of a patient with sepsis with hepatic abscesses due to YE infection. Workup revealed a past diagnosis of diabetes mellitus and hemochromatosis which had been untreated for the previo...

A significant body of literature supports the contention that pupil size varies depending on cognitive load, affective state, and level of drowsiness. Here we assessed whether oculometric measures such as gaze position, blink frequency and pupil size were correlated with the occurrence and time course of self-reported mind-wandering episodes. We recorded the pupil size of two subjects engaged i...

Mind wandering is a pervasive threat to transportation safety, potentially accounting for a substantial number of crashes and fatalities. In the current study, mind wandering was induced through completion of the same task for 5 days, consisting of a 20-min monotonous freeway-driving scenario, a cognitive depletion task, and a repetition of the 20-min driving scenario driven in the reverse dire...