People often ‘‘mind wander” during everyday tasks, temporarily losing track of time, place, or current task goals. In laboratory-based tasks, mind wandering is often associated with performance decrements in behavioral variables and changes in neural recordings. Such empirical associations provide descriptive accounts of mind wandering – howit affects ongoing task performance – but fail to ...

Psychological theory is advanced through empirical tests of predictions derived from quantitative cognitive models. As cognitive models are developed and extended, they tend to increase in complexity–leading to more precise predictions–which places concomitant demands on the behavioral data used to discriminate between candidate theories. To aid discrimination between cognitive models and, more ...

Mind wandering reflects the shift in attentional focus from task-related cognition driven by external stimuli toward self-generated and internally-oriented thought processes. Although such task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) are pervasive and detrimental to task performance, their underlying neural mechanisms are only modestly understood. To investigate TUTs with high spatial and temporal precision, we ...