The wandering mind oscillates: EEG alpha power is enhanced during moments of mind-wandering
- PDF / 502,448 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 90 Downloads / 178 Views
The wandering mind oscillates: EEG alpha power is enhanced during moments of mind-wandering Rebecca J. Compton 1 & Dylan Gearinger 1 & Hannah Wild 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract What is your brain doing while your mind is wandering? This study used a within-subjects experience-sampling design to test whether episodes of mind-wandering during a demanding cognitive task are associated with increases in EEG alpha power. Alpha refers to cyclic oscillations in EEG activity at 8–12 Hz, and has been previously correlated with internally rather than externally directed cognition. Participants completed a speeded performance task with more than 800 trials while EEG was recorded. Intermittent experience-sampling probes asked participants to indicate whether their mind was wandering or on-task. Participants reported mind-wandering in response to approximately half of the probes. EEG alpha power was significantly higher preceding probes to which participants reported mind-wandering, compared with probes to which participants reported being on task. These findings imply that dynamic changes in alpha power may prove a valuable tool in studying momentary fluctuations in mind-wandering. Keywords Mind-wandering . EEG . Alpha oscillations . Experience sampling
Mind-wandering is a common occurrence, but it is challenging to study because it is internally experienced and spontaneously generated. Sometimes referred to as daydreaming, task-unrelated thought, or off-task cognition, mindwandering generally refers to cognition that is directed toward an internal stream of thought rather than toward external stimuli or tasks immediately at hand (Smallwood & Schooler, 2015). A continuing methodological challenge is identifying when mind-wandering episodes occur, as cognition unfolds on a dynamic moment-to-moment basis. Measures of brain activity could provide indices of mindwandering, as well as information about its neural basis, if such measures could be reliably associated with mindwandering episodes (Gruberger, Ben-Simon, Levkovitz, Zangen, & Hendler, 2011). Some fMRI studies have found that activity increases in a set of brain regions known as the default mode network during states associated with mindwandering, such as conditions when the participant has no explicit task (resting state versus a task-directed condition) or when the participant reports engaging in more versus less * Rebecca J. Compton [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Ave, Haverford, PA 19041, USA
spontaneous thought (Andrews-Hanna, Irving, Fox, Spreng, & Christoff, 2018). Although such fMRI approaches are promising, the prohibitive cost and practical constraints of fMRI, combined with a sluggish hemodynamic response that may not easily track momentary changes leave the door open for complementary approaches. The temporal precision of EEG makes it a promising technique for studying mind-wandering episodes. Specifically, EEG alpha activity may provide a potential indirect index of internally directed
Data Loading...
