Opening the black box: Think Aloud as a method to study the spontaneous stream of consciousness.

Asking participants to Think Aloud is a common method for studying conscious experience, but it remains unclear whether this approach alters thought qualities-such as meta-awareness, rate of topic shifts, or the content of thoughts in task-absent conditions. To investigate this, we conducted two studies comparing thinking aloud to thinking silently. In Study 1, 111 participants alternated between 15-minute intervals of verbalizing and silently reflecting on their stream of consciousness in a counterbalanced design.

When is a wandering mind unhappy? The role of thought valence.

The current research represents one of the first attempts to investigate how various thought qualities that naturally fluctuate across attention states (i.e., mind wandering vs.

Evidence-based scientific thinking and decision-making in everyday life.

In today's knowledge economy, it is critical to make decisions based on high-quality evidence. Science-related decision-making is thought to rely on a complex interplay of reasoning skills, cognitive styles, attitudes, and motivations toward information. By investigating the relationship between individual differences and behaviors related to evidence-based decision-making, our aim was to better understand how adults engage with scientific information in everyday life.

Standing out: an atypical salience account of creativity.

Creativity often entails gaining a novel perspective, yet it remains uncertain how this is accomplished. Atypical salience processing may foster creative thinking by prioritizing putatively irrelevant information, thereby broadening the material accessible for idea generation and inhibiting attentional fixedness; in essence, motivating creative individuals to incorporate information that others overlook.