TY - JOUR
T1 - Shaped by our thoughts - A new task to assess spontaneous cognition and its associated neural correlates in the default network
AU - O'Callaghan, Claire
AU - Shine, James M.
AU - Lewis, Simon J.G.
AU - Andrews-Hanna, Jessica R.
AU - Irish, Muireann
N1 - Funding Information:
CO is supported by an Alzheimer’s Australia Dementia Research Foundation PhD scholarship. JMS has no financial disclosures to make. SJGL is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Practitioner Fellowship ( 1003007 ). JRAH is supported by a National Institutes of Mental Health Fellowship ( 5F32MH093985 ). MI is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award ( DE130100463 ). The authors would also like to thank the three anonymous Reviewers for their helpful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2015/2/1
Y1 - 2015/2/1
N2 - Self-generated cognition, or mind wandering, refers to the quintessentially human tendency to withdraw from the immediate external environment and engage in internally driven mentation. This thought activity is suggested to be underpinned by a distributed set of regions in the brain, referred to as the default network. To date, experimental assessment of mind wandering has typically taken place during performance of a concurrent attention-demanding task. The attentional demands of concurrent tasks can influence the emergence of mind wandering, and their application to clinical disorders with reduced cognitive resources is limited. Furthermore, few paradigms have investigated the phenomenological content of mind wandering episodes. Here, we present data from a novel thought sampling task that measures both the frequency and qualitative content of mind wandering, in the absence of a concurrent task to reduce cognitive demand. The task was validated in a non-pathological cohort of 31 older controls and resting-state functional connectivity analyses in a subset of participants (. n= 18) was conducted to explore the neural bases of mind wandering. Overall, instances of mind wandering were found to occur in 37% of experimental trials. Resting state functional connectivity analyses confirmed that mind wandering frequency was associated with regional patterns of both increased and decreased default network connectivity, namely in the temporal lobe, posterior cingulate cortex and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. Our findings demonstrate that the novel task provides a context of low cognitive demand, which is conducive to mind wandering. Furthermore, performance on the task is associated with specific patterns of functional connectivity in the default network. Together, this new paradigm offers an important avenue to investigate the frequency and content of mind wandering in the context of low cognitive demands, and has significant potential to be applied in clinical conditions with reduced cognitive resources.
AB - Self-generated cognition, or mind wandering, refers to the quintessentially human tendency to withdraw from the immediate external environment and engage in internally driven mentation. This thought activity is suggested to be underpinned by a distributed set of regions in the brain, referred to as the default network. To date, experimental assessment of mind wandering has typically taken place during performance of a concurrent attention-demanding task. The attentional demands of concurrent tasks can influence the emergence of mind wandering, and their application to clinical disorders with reduced cognitive resources is limited. Furthermore, few paradigms have investigated the phenomenological content of mind wandering episodes. Here, we present data from a novel thought sampling task that measures both the frequency and qualitative content of mind wandering, in the absence of a concurrent task to reduce cognitive demand. The task was validated in a non-pathological cohort of 31 older controls and resting-state functional connectivity analyses in a subset of participants (. n= 18) was conducted to explore the neural bases of mind wandering. Overall, instances of mind wandering were found to occur in 37% of experimental trials. Resting state functional connectivity analyses confirmed that mind wandering frequency was associated with regional patterns of both increased and decreased default network connectivity, namely in the temporal lobe, posterior cingulate cortex and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. Our findings demonstrate that the novel task provides a context of low cognitive demand, which is conducive to mind wandering. Furthermore, performance on the task is associated with specific patterns of functional connectivity in the default network. Together, this new paradigm offers an important avenue to investigate the frequency and content of mind wandering in the context of low cognitive demands, and has significant potential to be applied in clinical conditions with reduced cognitive resources.
KW - Ageing
KW - Default network
KW - Medial temporal lobes
KW - Mind wandering
KW - Phenomenology
KW - Resting state functional connectivity
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U2 - 10.1016/j.bandc.2014.11.001
DO - 10.1016/j.bandc.2014.11.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 25463243
AN - SCOPUS:84910656702
VL - 93
SP - 1
EP - 10
JO - Brain and Cognition
JF - Brain and Cognition
SN - 0278-2626
ER -