Structure in the stream of consciousness: Evidence from a verbalized thought protocol and automated text analytic methods

Sripada, Chandra; Taxali, Aman

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2020.103007

Cited by 23 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…We have concerns about thought probes that require subjects to (a) infer constraint, which may share the same vulnerabilities to bias and confabulation as intentionality reports, and (b) retrospect over non-specified durations in order to infer and report thought movement. Moving-thought probes might therefore be validated against think-aloud protocols, which yield a relatively continuous report of the contents of consciousness (see Sripada and Taxali, 2020), 8 and against methods that infer thought movement by examining 8 Mills et al (2018) did something close to this, analyzing data from 18 subjects who responded to thought probes while engaged in 30 min of silent thought. At each probe, subjects rated whether their mind had been moving freely on a 1-7 scale and they typed a brief description of their thoughts since the last probe, in chronological sequence.…”

Section: Probe Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the construct validity of competing measurement approaches to probed mind-wandering reports

et al. 2021

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Psychology faces a measurement crisis, and mind-wandering research is not immune. The present study explored the construct validity of probed mind-wandering reports (i.e., reports of task-unrelated thought [TUT]) with a combined experimental and individual-differences approach. We examined laboratory data from over 1000 undergraduates at two U.S. institutions, who responded to one of four different thought-probe types across two cognitive tasks. We asked a fundamental measurement question: Do different probe types yield different results, either in terms of average reports (average TUT rates, TUT-report confidence ratings), or in terms of TUT-report associations, such as TUT rate or confidence stability across tasks, or between TUT reports and other consciousness-related constructs (retrospective mind-wandering ratings, executive-control performance, and broad questionnaire trait assessments of distractibility–restlessness and positive-constructive daydreaming)? Our primary analyses compared probes that asked subjects to report on different dimensions of experience: TUT-content probes asked about what they’d been mind-wandering about, TUT-intentionality probes asked about why they were mind-wandering, and TUT-depth probes asked about the extent (on a rating scale) of their mind-wandering. Our secondary analyses compared thought-content probes that did versus didn’t offer an option to report performance-evaluative thoughts. Our findings provide some “good news”—that some mind-wandering findings are robust across probing methods—and some “bad news”—that some findings are not robust across methods and that some commonly used probing methods may not tell us what we think they do. Our results lead us to provisionally recommend content-report probes rather than intentionality- or depth-report probes for most mind-wandering research.

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Section: Probe Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the construct validity of competing measurement approaches to probed mind-wandering reports

et al. 2021

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“…By demonstrating stimulus-independent event segmentation during continuous and naturalistic recall, our study bridges the gap between the fields of event segmentation and spontaneous internal thoughts (also see Tseng & Poppenk, 2020). Without any task demands or external constraints, the mind constantly shifts between different internal contexts (Raffaelli et al, 2021; Sripada & Taxali, 2020). What are the characteristics of neural responses to different types of spontaneous mental context boundaries (e.g., between two different memories, between external attention and future thinking)?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A generalized cortical activity pattern at internally-generated mental context boundaries during unguided narrative recall

Lee

Chen

2021

Preprint

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Current theory and empirical studies suggest that humans segment continuous experiences into events based on the mismatch between predicted and actual sensory inputs; detection of these "event boundaries" evokes transient neural responses. However, boundaries can also occur at transitions between internal mental states, without relevant external input changes. To what extent do such "internal boundaries" share neural response properties with externally-driven boundaries? We conducted an fMRI experiment where subjects watched a series of short movies and then verbally recalled the movies, unprompted, in the order of their choosing. During recall, transitions between movies thus constituted major boundaries between internal mental contexts, generated purely by subjects' unguided thoughts. Following the offset of each recalled movie, we observed stereotyped spatial activation patterns in the default mode network, especially the posterior medial cortex, consistent across different movie contents and even across the different tasks of movie watching and recall. Surprisingly, the between-movie boundary patterns were negatively correlated with patterns at boundaries between events within a movie. Thus, major transitions between mental contexts elicit neural phenomena shared across internal and external modes and distinct from within-context event boundary detection, potentially reflecting a cognitive state related to the flushing and reconfiguration of situation models.

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“…Whereas unconstrained thought is described as temporally unstable (i.e., having more variable content and less-predictable transitions between thoughts), constrained thought is described as temporally stable [that is, having more consistent content and fewer, predictable transitions; Mills et al, 2018]. This would suggest that temporal stability needs to be monitored and maintained in order to deliberately constrain one’s thoughts (Sripada & Taxali, 2020). Because monitoring is a resource-demanding process (Smith & Bayen, 2005; Smith et al, 2007), more deliberately-constrained thought should consume more executive resources.…”

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confidence: 99%

Thought dynamics under task demands: Evaluating the influence of task difficulty on unconstrained thought.

Brosowsky

Murray

Schooler

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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As research on mind wandering has accelerated, the construct's defining features have expanded and researchers have begun to examine different dimensions of mind wandering. Recently, Christoff and colleagues have argued for the importance of investigating a hitherto neglected variety of mind wandering: "unconstrained thought," or, thought that is relatively unguided by executive-control processes. To date, with only a few studies investigating unconstrained thought, little is known about this intriguing type of mind wandering. Across 2 experiments, we examined, for the first time, whether changes in task demand influence rates of constrained versus unconstrained thoughts. In both experiments, participants completed either an easy (0-back) or hard (2-back) task and responded to intermittently presented thought probes that gauged thought constraint throughout the task. In Experiment 1, we found that participants completing the easy task engaged in unconstrained thoughts more frequently than those completing the difficult task. In Experiment 2, we replicated this result and further demonstrated manipulations of unconstrained thought while also measuring task-relatedness (a common dimension of mind wandering). Finally, exploratory analyses showed associations between constrained thought and age, verbal intelligence, and an assessment of flow ('deep effortless concentration'), thereby adding further evidence to indicate a dissociation between taskrelatedness and constraint. We discuss the methodological and theoretical applications of our findings to the burgeoning field of research on unconstrained thought. All data, analysis, article, and experiment code can be found at https://osf.io/wr2vk/ Public Significance StatementIn the current study, we established that task difficulty can be used to effectively manipulate rates of thought constraint. This study provides novel evidence that when resources are limited, participants engage in less unconstrained thought. These important theoretical contributions further refine thought constraint as a construct within the Dynamic Framework and narrow the candidate processes underlying (un)constrained thought.

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Structure in the stream of consciousness: Evidence from a verbalized thought protocol and automated text analytic methods

Cited by 23 publications

References 55 publications

Testing the construct validity of competing measurement approaches to probed mind-wandering reports

Testing the construct validity of competing measurement approaches to probed mind-wandering reports

A generalized cortical activity pattern at internally-generated mental context boundaries during unguided narrative recall

Thought dynamics under task demands: Evaluating the influence of task difficulty on unconstrained thought.

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