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Human minds often engage in thoughts and feelings that are self-generated rather than stimulus-dependent, such as daydreaming. Recent research suggests that under certain circumstances, daydreaming is associated with adverse effects on cognition and affect. Based on recent literature about the influence of resting mind in relation to rumination and depression, this questionnaire study investigated mechanisms linking daydreaming to depressive symptoms. Specifically, an indirect effect model was tested in which daydreaming influences depressive symptoms through enhancing self-focus and ruminative thought. Results were in line with the hypothesis and several alternative pathways were ruled out. The results provide initial supportive evidence that daydreaming can influence depressive symptoms through influences on self-focus and rumination. Further research should use prospective or experimental designs to further validate and strengthen these conclusions.

In the recent literature on bilingualism, a lively debate has arisen about the long-term effects of bilingualism on cognition and the brain. These studies yield inconsistent results, in part because they rely on comparisons between bilingual and monolingual control groups that may also differ on other variables. In the present neuroimaging study, we adopted a longitudinal design, assessing the long-term anatomical and cognitive effects of an extreme form of bilingualism, namely simultaneous interpreting. We compared a group of students starting interpreting training with a closely matched group of translators, before and after nine months of training. We assessed behavioral performance and neural activity during cognitive control tasks, as well as the structural connectivity between brain regions that are involved in cognitive control. Despite the lack of behavioral differences between the two groups over time, functional and structural neural differences did arise. At the functional level, interpreters showed an increase of activation in the right angular gyrus and the left superior temporal gyrus in two non-verbal cognitive control tasks (the Simon task and a color-shape switch task), relative to the translators. At the structural level, we identified a significant increment of the structural connectivity in two different subnetworks specifically for the interpreters. The first network, the frontal-basal ganglia subnetwork, has been related to domain-general and language-specific cognitive control. The second subnetwork, in which the cerebellum and the supplementary motor area (SMA) play a key role, has recently also been proposed as an important language control network. These results suggest that interpreters undergo plastic changes in specific control-related brain networks to handle the extreme language control that takes place during interpreter training.

There is currently a lively debate in the literature whether bilingualism leads to enhanced cognitive control or not. Recent evidence suggests that knowledge of more than one language does not always suffice for the manifestation of a bilingual cognitive control advantage. As a result, ongoing research has focused on modalities of bilingual language use that may interact with the bilingual advantage. In this study, we explored the cognitive control performance of simultaneous interpreters. These highly proficient bilinguals comprehend information in one language while producing in the other language, which is a complex skill requiring high levels of language control. In a first experiment, we compared professional interpreters to monolinguals. Data were collected on interference suppression (flanker task), prepotent response inhibition (Simon task), and short-term memory (digit span task). The results showed that the professional interpreters performed similarly to the monolinguals on all measures. In Experiment 2, we compared professional interpreters to monolinguals and second language teachers. Data were collected on interference suppression (advanced flanker task), prepotent response inhibition (advanced flanker task), attention (advanced flanker task), short-term memory (Hebb repetition paradigm), and updating (n-back task). We found converging evidence for our finding that experience in interpreting may not lead to superior interference suppression, prepotent response inhibition, and short-term memory. In fact, our results showed that the professional interpreters performed similarly to both the monolinguals and the second language teachers on all tested cognitive control measures. We did, however, find anecdotal evidence for a (small) advantage in short-term memory for interpreters relative to monolinguals when analyzing composite scores of both experiments together. Taken together, the results of the current study suggest that interpreter experience does not necessarily lead to general cognitive control advantages. However, there may be small interpreter advantages in short-term memory, suggesting that this might be an important cognitive control aspect of simultaneous interpreting. The results are discussed in the light of ongoing debates about bilingual cognitive control advantages.

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