Self-reflection and the temporal focus of the wandering mind

Self-reflection and the temporal focus of the wandering mind

Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Consciousness and cognition Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 1120 - 1126
Main Authors: Smallwood, Jonathan, Schooler, Jonathan W., Turk, David J., Cunningham, Sheila J., Burns, Phebe, Macrae, C. Neil
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01-12-2011
Elsevier
Elsevier BV
Subjects:
Autobiographical memory
Biological and medical sciences
Cognitive psychology
Consciousness
Daydreaming
Fantasy
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Imagination
Learning. Memory
Male
Memory
Mental Recall
Mental time travel
Metacognition
Mind-wandering
Neuropsychology
Prospective thought
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Self
Self Concept
Stimulus independent thought
Task unrelated thought
Time Factors
Young Adult
Daydreaming
Prospective thought
Task unrelated thought
Stimulus independent thought
Mind-wandering
Autobiographical memory
Mental time travel
Self
Human
Cognition
Self perception
Experimental study
Fantasy thinking
Distraction
Episodic memory
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Summary:Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants’ engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength of self-referential thought — as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items — was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future.
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ISSN:1053-8100
1090-2376
DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2010.12.017