Conscious experience is fluid, rarely staying on one topic for long. Mind wandering illustrates this, as attention shifts from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Its content and relation to meta-cognition determine functional outcomes. Mind wandering involves perceptual decoupling to escape the moment, with content arising from episodic and affective processes, regulated by executive control. It carries costs, linked to errors, and benefits, associated with creativity and future planning. Strategies can minimize downsides while maintaining productive aspects.
A two-week meditation-training program improved people's ability to accurately judge their own memory performance, but not their perceptual accuracy. Participants who completed the meditation program showed significantly enhanced introspective accuracy on a trial-by-trial basis for memory tasks, compared to an active control group that showed no change. These findings suggest that the capacity to introspect can be improved through mental training, at least in some cognitive domains.
On the centennial of William James's death, the author considers how James might have responded to Fox, Ericsson, and Best's (2011) defense of think-aloud protocols for capturing the stream of consciousness. James would likely view the procedure as scientifically rigorous introspection but would caution that it captures substantive verbal thoughts while missing inchoate cognitions. The author also notes that the conclusion that verbal protocols are nonreactive does not speak to their validity and conflicts with findings that verbalization impairs performance on some tasks. James would be pleased that introspection is finally receiving scientific grounding.
Principal component analysis of response times during a continuous performance task can distinguish mental states. Three components accounted for 58.8% of the variance in response time data. The second-largest component was a marker for mind wandering: it was stronger under slow stimulus presentation (paralleling the distribution of mind-wandering reports) and more powerful before failures in response inhibition (a behavioral marker of mind wandering) and less powerful before reports of task-focused thinking. The analysis appears to be a viable tool for differentiating mental states and may help identify neural substrates underlying mind wandering.