Abstract:The human mind is equally fluent in thoughts that involve self-generated mental content as it is with information in the immediate environment. Previous research has shown that neural systems linked to executive control (i.e. the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) are recruited when perceptual and self-generated thoughts are balanced in line with the demands imposed by the external world. Contemporary theories (Smallwood and Schooler, 2015) assume that differentiable processes are important for self-generated men… Show more
“…We found that this approach revealed four dimensions that we summarised as "episodic social cognition", "intrusive negative thought", "detailed deliberate thought" and "self focus". Three of these dimensions, "episodic social cognition", "detail and deliberate" and "intrusive negative", were similar to ones observed in our prior study using the same set of questions and assessing experience in a simple signal detection paradigm (Konu et al, 2020). In the current study, each of the four dimensions captured by PCA varied across the task environments we studied.…”
Section: Discussionsupporting
confidence: 77%
“…In our study, we used multidimensional experience sampling (MDES) to identify different features of thought patterns, using a set of questions that we used in a prior brain imaging study (Konu et al, 2020). In our prior study we examined how the different patterns of thoughts were associated with ongoing neural activity during a low demand sustained attention task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).…”
Previous research suggests that patterns of ongoing thought are heterogeneous, varying across situations and individuals. The current study investigated the influence of a wide range of tasks and individual affective style on ongoing patterns of thought. In total, we used 9 different tasks and measured ongoing thought using multidimensional experience sampling. A Principle Component Analysis of the experience sampling data revealed four patterns of ongoing thought. Linear Mixed Modelling was used to examine the contextual distribution of the thought patterns. Different thought patterns were found to relate to different types of conditions. Intrusive and negative thought pattern expression was found to be influenced by individual affective style (depression level). Overall, these data show that patterns of thought are subject to both contextual and intrinsic variation, suggesting that understanding these important features of experience across a broad range of situations will be useful in understanding their role in human experience.HighlightsPatterns of thought vary across different task contextsThought pattern expression is influenced by individual affective styleThere is a need to broaden the tasks used to study ongoing thought
“…We found that this approach revealed four dimensions that we summarised as "episodic social cognition", "intrusive negative thought", "detailed deliberate thought" and "self focus". Three of these dimensions, "episodic social cognition", "detail and deliberate" and "intrusive negative", were similar to ones observed in our prior study using the same set of questions and assessing experience in a simple signal detection paradigm (Konu et al, 2020). In the current study, each of the four dimensions captured by PCA varied across the task environments we studied.…”
Section: Discussionsupporting
confidence: 77%
“…In our study, we used multidimensional experience sampling (MDES) to identify different features of thought patterns, using a set of questions that we used in a prior brain imaging study (Konu et al, 2020). In our prior study we examined how the different patterns of thoughts were associated with ongoing neural activity during a low demand sustained attention task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).…”
Previous research suggests that patterns of ongoing thought are heterogeneous, varying across situations and individuals. The current study investigated the influence of a wide range of tasks and individual affective style on ongoing patterns of thought. In total, we used 9 different tasks and measured ongoing thought using multidimensional experience sampling. A Principle Component Analysis of the experience sampling data revealed four patterns of ongoing thought. Linear Mixed Modelling was used to examine the contextual distribution of the thought patterns. Different thought patterns were found to relate to different types of conditions. Intrusive and negative thought pattern expression was found to be influenced by individual affective style (depression level). Overall, these data show that patterns of thought are subject to both contextual and intrinsic variation, suggesting that understanding these important features of experience across a broad range of situations will be useful in understanding their role in human experience.HighlightsPatterns of thought vary across different task contextsThought pattern expression is influenced by individual affective styleThere is a need to broaden the tasks used to study ongoing thought
“…Figure 1 shows an example of dimensions calculated in this way from data recorded in three different situations: in the behavioral lab, during neuroimaging and in daily life. It can be seen that dimensions produced in this manner produce word clouds with broadly similar features, and studies have shown that they have robust correlations across time ( Konu et al, 2020 ).…”
Section: Content Form and Situation As Boundary Conditions In Undermentioning
confidence: 99%
“… Figure 2 Neural regions dissociating external task focus and states of episodic social cognition reflect opposing ends of a task-positive hierarchy Studies highlight that regions which are active during external task focus (shown in blue) and during self-generated episodic social thought (shown in red) fall at opposing sides of a neural hierarchy that describes the brain response to external tasks. The top left panel shows greater neural activity within the ventral medial prefrontal cortex when individuals engage in social episodic thought ( Konu et al, 2020 ). The top right panel shows regions of the intra-parietal sulcus exhibiting greater activation when individuals are engaged in external task focus ( Turnbull et al., 2019a ).…”
Section: Mapping the Neural Features Of Different Ongoing Thought Patmentioning
Summary
A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the experience and context dependence of patterns of ongoing thought. These studies reveal that systems linked to attention and control are important for organizing experience in response to changing environmental demands. These studies also establish a role of the default mode network beyond task-negative or purely episodic content, for example, implicating it in the level of vivid detail in experience in both task contexts and in spontaneous self-generated experiential states. Together, this work demonstrates that the landscape of ongoing thought is reflected in the activity of multiple neural systems, and it is important to distinguish between processes contributing to how the experience unfolds from those linked to how these experiences are regulated.
“…This deactivation led to the initial characterisation of the DMN as "task-negative" (e.g., Raichle et al 2001;Fox et al 2005), but it is now clear that the DMN supports internally-focussed cognitive states -for example, thinking about the past, future, ourselves or other people (Christoff et al 2009;Spreng et al 2009; Spreng and Grady 2010;Konu et al 2020) -both when these states occur spontaneously, during mind-wandering (Mason et al 2007;Fox et al 2015;Smallwood et al 2016), and in tasks such as autobiographical memory retrieval (Spreng et al 2009;Spreng and Grady 2010;Sheldon et al 2016).…”
Semantic cognition can be both perceptually-coupled, for example, during reading, and decoupled, such as in daydreams. Mind-wandering, characterised by autobiographical memory retrieval, often interferes with externally-focussed tasks. This study investigated the neural basis of these states, when they occur in isolation and in competition, using fMRI. Participants were asked to read sentences, presented word-by-word, or to recall personal memories, as a proxy for mind-wandering. Task conflict was created by presenting sentences during memory recall, or memory cues before sentences. We found that different subsystems of the default mode network (DMN) do not fully dissociate across internally- and externally-oriented states, and they do not fully separate in terms of the effects of task focus; this depends on the task. The lateral temporal DMN subsystem, associated with semantic cognition, was activated across both tasks, and by sentence inputs even when they were task-irrelevant. In the core DMN subsystem, greater task focus corresponded to a selective pattern of activation during memory recall and deactivation during reading. Both DMN subsystems formed different patterns of functional coupling depending on the task. In this way, DMN supports both access to meaning from perceptual inputs and focussed internal cognitive states in the face of distracting external information.
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