Mind-wandering with and without Awareness: An fMRI study of spontaneous thought processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of our daily mental life is occupied by spontaneous thought processes.Evidence is accumulating that such spontaneous thought processes, which are often experienced as mind-wandering, share the same cognitive and neural resources that subserve goal-directed thought.While a distinction between mind-wandering with and without awareness has been made at a cognitive level, the mechanisms underlying this distinction at a neural level remain unknown.The present study employs a novel paradigm that was designed to examine this question by directly investigating instances of mind-wandering, using fMRI.A continuously engaging background task was employed, combined with a thought sampling approach that determined whether subjects were mind-wandering at a given moment of time, and whether they were aware of where their thought processes were focused.A clear distinction between spontaneous thought processes that occurred with and without awareness emerged.Temporal lobe structures were activated during mind-wandering in the absence of awareness, while prefrontal cortex was activated when subjects were aware of their own thoughts.These findings complement recent cognitive theories of spontaneous thought, by providing evidence for neural distinction between these two kinds of mind-wandering in addition to the previously proposed cognitive distinction.As well, the results suggest that an important aspect of human thought processes, which has been largely ignored thus far, may be the spontaneous generation of thoughts in the absence of awareness or explicit conscious goals.The implications for cognitive theories of human thought are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".