The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness.

By J. Smallwood, Jonathan W. Schooler. Annual Review of Psychology, 2015

1,507 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b099568f69e08bb020ba7760c68dd8b94f0a5ae5

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes (2015, positive): “…task-related literature, there is considerable evidence from phenomenological studies that mind-wandering is a heterogeneous set of cognitive processes, evoking multiple types of content that vary both within and across individuals (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014b; Smallwood and Schooler, 2006, 2014).”
Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices between Immediate and Delayed Rewards (2016, background): “Such findings suggest that people often resort to imagining future possibilities when external task demands are low (Burgess, Dumontheil, & Gilbert, 2007; Corballis, 2012, 2013; Mason et al., 2007; Smallwood & Schooler, 2015; Smallwood, Tipper, et al., 2013; Spreng & Grady, 2010).”
Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective (2015, background): “It has been defined as the mental state that arises when attention is directed toward explicitly noting the current contents of consciousness (Schooler, 2002; Smallwood & Schooler, 2015).”
Capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of self-generated, task-initiated thoughts with EEG and fMRI (2019, neutral): “Spontaneous mentation is neither random nor meaningless (Smallwood and Schooler, 2015), however how to precisely capture the wan-”
Hierarchical consciousness: the Nested Observer Windows model (2024, background): “• While reading a book, a common experience is that of mind-wandering (J. W. Schooler et al. 2011b, Smallwood and Schooler 2015).”