CPA-EST · Mind-wandering in everyday event comprehension: Memory, attention, and the brain
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2020-08-31
- EU contribution
- €160,465
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-GF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Mind-wandering in everyday event comprehension: Memory, attention, and the brain
Mind-wandering is the occurrence of thoughts that are decoupled from immediate perceptual inputs and unrelated to the activity at hand, like for instance starting to think about leisure activities while reading a document. Mind-wandering episodes represent around 30 to 50% of our daily thinking time and have substantial negative effects on memory, reading, and other activities that require focused attention. At the same time, mind-wandering can enhance creativity and afford opportunities to plan and prepare for the future. However, most of what we currently know about mind-wandering comes from laboratory studies where the tasks from which the mind wanders are simple, boring, repetitive, and do not reflect the richness of daily life events. To overcome this barrier, we leveraged new advances in methods to study naturalistic event comprehension in the laboratory and daily life. We across three studies, we adopted a multi-method approach that involved experience sampling of mind-wandering episodes in daily life as well as the combination of validated event cognition tasks that involve the viewing of movies of naturalistic everyday activities with state-of-the-art techniques to measure the behavioral, physiological, and neural correlates of mind-wandering. Specifically, we used eye-tracking technology and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how the event structure of activities can modulate, neural and ocular correlates of mind-wandering, its frequency and content, as well as its impact on memory and comprehension. As expected, results showed that the features of mind-wandering were affected by the event structure of perceived naturalistic event. Together these studies provide the foundations for a detailed account of mind-wandering in naturalistic settings, laying the basis for future interventions aimed at helping individuals to capitalize on the benefits of mind-wandering in their daily life while minimizing the associated costs.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Mind-wandering (MW) is the occurrence of thoughts that are decoupled from immediate perceptual inputs and unrelated to the activity at hand. MW represents a substantial part of our daily thinking time and it has substantial negative effects on reading, memory, and the ability to focus attention. At the same time, MW can enhance creativity and afford opportunities to plan for the future. However, most of what we currently know about MW comes from laboratory studies where the tasks from which the mind wanders are simple, boring, repetitive, and do not reflect the richness of daily life events. A limited body of research using experience sampling gives a coarse-grained characterization of MW in real-life situations, but this approach cannot measure the detailed behavioral structure of MW, or its neural correlates, to reveal underlying mechanisms. To overcome this barrier, we will leverage new advances in methods to study naturalistic event comprehension in the laboratory. We will adopt a multi-method approach that will combine (i) validated event cognition tasks that involve the viewing of movies of naturalistic everyday activities with (ii) state-of-the-art techniques to measure the behavioral, physiological, and neural correlates of MW. Study 1 will use eye-tracking to determine whether and how the event structure of naturalistic activities affects the perceptual decoupling component of MW. Study 2 will examine how the structure of everyday activities can modulate the content of MW episodes. Finally, Study 3 will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how the neural correlates of MW are modulated by the event structure of everyday activities. Together, these studies will provide the foundations for a detailed account of MW in naturalistic settings, laying the basis for future interventions aimed at helping individuals to capitalize on the benefits of MW in their daily life while minimizing the associated costs.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE DE LIEGE · LIEGECoordinatorBelgium
- THE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY CORPORATION · St LouisUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union