A complete, unabridged, "pre-registered" descriptive experience sampling investigation: The case of Lena.

Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) attempts to apprehend in high fidelity pristine inner experience (the naturally-occurring, directly-apprehended phenomena that fill our waking lives, including inner speaking, visual imagery, sensory awarenesses, etc.). Previous DES investigations had shown individual differences in the frequency of inner speaking ranging from nearly zero to nearly 100% of the time.

Measuring the Frequency of Inner-Experience Characteristics.

Inner experience is widely accepted by psychologists and lay people as being straightforwardly observable: Inner speech, visual images, feelings, and so on are understood to be directly apprehendable "before the footlights of consciousness." Many psychologists hold that such characteristics of inner experience play substantial theoretical roles and have applied significance across a wide range of cognitive, affective, performance, and clinical situations. If so, the frequency of occurrence of these characteristics is of fundamental importance.

Measuring the Frequency of Inner-Experience Characteristics by Self-Report: The Nevada Inner Experience Questionnaire.

Descriptive experience sampling has suggested that there are five frequently occurring phenomena of inner experience: inner speaking, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. Descriptive experience sampling is a labor- and skill-intensive procedure, so it would be desirable to estimate the frequency of these phenomena by questionnaire. However, appropriate questionnaires either do not exist or have substantial limitations.

Investigating Multiple Streams of Consciousness: Using Descriptive Experience Sampling to Explore Internally and Externally Directed Streams of Thought.

Research into resting-state cognition has often struggled with the challenge of assessing inner experience in the resting state. We employed Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), a method aimed at generating detailed and high-fidelity descriptions of experience, to investigate how experience in the resting state can vary between internal, external, and multiple simultaneous streams. Using a large body of experiential and brain activation data acquired from five DES participants, independent raters classified sampled moments of experience according to whether they were internally directed, externally directed, or contained elements of both at the same time.

On investigating inner experience: Contrasting Moore & Schwitzgebel and Brouwers et al.

Moore and Schwitzgebel (this issue) reported that readers report innerly speak the text about 59% of the time. Brouwers et al. (2018) reported that readers innerly speak the text only about 3% of the time.