Lost in thoughts: Neural markers of low alertness during mind wandering
By Claire Braboszcz, Arnaud Delorme. NeuroImage, 2011
399 citations recorded by the source corpus.
During concentration tasks, spontaneous attention shifts occurs towards self-centered matters. Little is known about the brain oscillatory activity underlying these mental phenomena. We recorded 128-channels electroencephalographic activity from 12 subjects performing a breath-counting task. Subjects were instructed to press a button whenever, based on their introspective experience, they realized their attention had drifted away from the task. Theta (4-7 Hz) and delta (2-3.5 Hz) EEG activity increased during mind wandering whereas alpha (9-11 Hz) and beta (15-30 Hz) decreased. A passive auditory oddball protocol was presented to the subjects to test brain-evoked responses to perceptual stimuli during mind wandering. Mismatch negativity evoked at 100 ms after oddball stimuli onset decreased during mind wandering whereas the brain-evoked responses at 200 ms after stimuli onset increased. Spectral analyses and evoked related potential results suggest decreased alertness and sensory processing during mind wandering. To our knowledge, our experiment is one of the first neuro-imaging studies that relies purely on subjects' introspective judgment, and shows that such judgment may be used to contrast different brain activity patterns.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bae04518b5dbc08f116ca85e9e99869c5310a44
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Jonathan W. Schooler
- Michael D. Mrazek
- Benjamin W. Mooneyham
- Benjamin Baird
- Michael S. Franklin
- J. Broadway
- Claire M. Zedelius
- J. Smallwood
Citations in the corpus
- The Middle Way: Finding the Balance between Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering (2014, methodology): “…dilation (Smallwood et al., 2011, 2012) and heart rate (Smallwood et al., 2004); and brain activity as measured by fMRI (Christoff et al., 2009), ERPs (Smallwood, Beach, Schooler, et al., 2008; Smallwood, McSpadden, Luus, et al., 2008; Smallwood, et al., 2008), and EEGs (Braboszcz & Delorme, 2011).”
- Resting-state EEG correlates of sustained attention in healthy ageing: Cross-sectional findings from the LEISURE study. (2024, background): “Higher alpha power has been linked with better performance when a task requires sustained attention (Braboszcz and Delorme, 2011; Dockree et al., 2007; Sadaghiani and Kleinschmidt, 2016).”