A primary aim of mind-wandering research has been to understand its influence on task performance. While this research has typically highlighted the costs of mind wandering, a handful of studies have suggested that mind wandering may be beneficial in certain situations.Perhaps the most-touted benefit is that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates creative thinking. This finding has played a critical role in the development of accounts of the adaptive value of mind wandering and its functional role, as well as potential mechanisms of mind wandering. Thus, a demonstration of the replicability of this important finding is warranted. Here, we attempted to conceptually replicate results of a highly cited laboratory-based experiment supporting this finding. However, across two studies (N = 443), we found no evidence for the claim that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates a form of creativity associated with divergent thinking. We suggest that our failed conceptual replication stems from an inadequate characterization of mind wandering (taskunrelated thought), and that there are good reasons to think that task-unrelated thought is unlikely to be causally related to creativity. Our results cast doubt on the claim that taskunrelated thought during an incubation interval enhances divergent creativity while also offering some prescriptions for how future research might further elucidate the cognitive benefits of mind wandering.

The present study examined associations between physical activity, sleep, and academic outcomes in undergraduate students (N = 52). More consistent sleep throughout the semester (lower sleep variability) was associated with higher homework grades. The interaction between sleep variability and sleep quantity was not significant suggesting that greater sleep overall did not buffer students from the negative effects of sleep variability on grades.

Teaching is a complex activity that people often discuss metaphorically, as when a professor is described as a sculptor molding impressionable students. What do such metaphors reveal about how people conceptualize teaching? Previous work has addressed related questions largely via researcher intuition and qualitative analyses of teacher attitudes. We sought to develop a more principled method for mapping the entailments of metaphorical concepts, using teaching metaphors as a case study. We presented participants with one of four common metaphors for the teacher-student relationship (identified in a preliminary study) and asked them to rate the degree to which a series of teacher attributes fit the metaphor. We then used iterated exploratory factor analysis to identify a small number of dimensions that underlie people’s conceptions of teachers and examined whether the metaphors systematically differed along these dimensions. We found that teaching metaphors bring to mind distinct, coherent clusters of teacher attributes and different intuitions about teacher responsibility and power – a finding we replicated in a larger, pre-registered follow-up study using a new set of participants. This work provides a novel method for mapping the entailments of metaphorical concepts and sets the stage for educational interventions centered on shifting lay theories of teaching.