An Exploration/Exploitation Trade-off Between Mind-Wandering and Goal-Directed Thinking

Abstract

Agents invariably face trade-offs between exploration, which increases informational stores and potentially opens up new opportunities, and exploitation, which utilizes existing informational stores to take advantage of known opportunities. This exploration/exploitation trade-off has been extensively studied in computer science and has been productively applied to multiple cognitive domains. In this chapter, this framework is extended to the ubiquitous alternation between two modes of serial thought: mind-wandering and goal-directed thought. The exploration/exploitation framework provides a new perspective on the functionality of mind-wandering and its pattern of regular switching with goal-directed thought. It also raises new hypotheses about the regulation of mind-wandering across time and differences in the propensity to mind-wander across individuals.

Spontaneous future cognition: the past, present and future of an emerging topic

“…Ultimately, we associate spontaneous mental processes with what has been termed System 1 processes, which stand in contrast to deliberate mental processes (termed System 2 processes, associated with high effort, and slow, analytic processes, such as planning one's weekly groceries or calculating 25 × 12. For reviews see Evans, 2008;Kahneman, 2011;Sripada, 2018).…”

Attention norms in Siegel’s The Rationality of Perception

“…Specifically, I will sketch an attention norm regarding the trade‐off between mental exploration and exploitation. Core processes that navigate this tradeoff are associational, rather than inferential (Christoff, Irving, Fox, Spreng, & Andrews‐Hanna, ; Gopnik et al, ; Sripada, ). So if there is an attention norm that concerns the explore–exploit tradeoff, the inferential model is unlikely to explain why.…”

“…Two of the most pervasive avenues for human exploration are arguably mind‐wandering (Christoff et al, ; Sripada, ) and childhood (Gopnik et al, ). Exploratory theories of mind‐wandering and childhood are motivated by analogous question: why do mind‐wandering (Sripada, ) and childhood (Gopnik et al, ) take up so much of our lives? Mind‐wandering occupies up to half our waking thoughts (Kane et al, ; Killingsworth & Gilbert, ).…”

“…Part of the answer may be that mind‐wandering and childhood function as periods of mental exploration. Mind‐wandering arguably facilitates exploration because of its dynamics: how attention meanders between ideas that are linked by only loose associations (Christoff et al, ; Irving, ; Sripada, ). Consider someone whose mind wanders from topic to topic: she remembers the lightbulbs she needs to buy, then pictures the beautiful flowers that will grow from her tulip bulbs, then considers whether to revive that long‐neglected aesthetics paper.…”

“…Recall that Siegel explicitly contrasts inference with associational thought, which moves between associated concepts. But mind‐wandering and childhood thinking are likely driven by associations (Sripada, ) – for example, between lightbulbs and beautiful tulip bulbs and aesthetics. The Inferential Model should therefore classify these forms of associational thought as arational: as ‘normative freebies’ (Siegel, , p. 160) that are not subject to rational appraisal.…”