Even when people's minds wander while listening to an audiobook, their brains continue to predict upcoming words. In 25 participants listening to over 12,000 words of an audiobook, mind-wandering reduced early brain responses to word onsets and altered EEG spectral patterns, but neural markers of word-level surprise and semantic content remained intact. The brain's encoding of predictive context persisted during mind-wandering, though weaker than during attentive listening. This suggests that the brain predicts and monitors speech even when subjective experience is dimmed, indicating that shared computational mechanisms with language models are insufficient for conscious experience of meaning.
People differ reliably in how quickly non-conscious visual stimuli enter awareness, a trait linked to later cognitive and emotional processes. Two experiments tested whether this prioritization speed relates to noticing changes in a change blindness task. In the first experiment (97 participants), faster prioritization correlated with better change detection across multiple measures. A preregistered replication (99 participants) confirmed this correlation and showed it was not explained by variability in other perceptual-decision tasks. The findings suggest that the speed of becoming aware of stimuli is tightly connected to conscious experiences in other situations.