Little is known about mind wandering in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we evaluated the subjective experience of mind wandering in AD. We invited AD patients and control participants to rate the occurrence, intentionality, emotionality, visual imagery, specificity, self-relatedness and temporal orientation of mind wandering. Analysis showed that AD patients rated their mind wandering as more frequent, negative, and more oriented toward the past, but less vivid and specific than that of control participants. No significant differences were observed between AD patients and control participants regarding the intentionality or self-relatedness of mind wandering. These findings demonstrate the negative content in AD. Regarding the reduction of visual imagery and specificity during mind wandering, this reduction may mirror a diminished subjective experience of mind wandering in AD. Regarding temporality, our results may reflect a tendency of AD patients to reminisce over past experiences. Finally, mind wandering in AD seems to trigger significant self-related content.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13546805.2020.1722085 | DOI Listing |
Behav Res Methods
January 2025
Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
In this article, we discuss operationalizations and examples of experimental design in eye-tracking research. First, we distinguish direct operationalization for entities like saccades, which are closely aligned with their original concepts, and indirect operationalization for concepts not directly measurable, such as attention or mind-wandering. The latter relies on selecting a measurable proxy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Behav
January 2025
Division of Brain, Imaging and Behavior, Krembil Brain Institute, Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Purpose: Pain is inherently salient and so draws our attention in addition to impacting performance on attention-demanding tasks. Individual variability in pain-attention interactions can be assessed by two kinds of behavioral phenotypes that quantify how individuals prioritize pain versus attentional needs. The intrinsic attention to pain (IAP) measure quantifies the degree to which a person attends to pain (high-IAP) or mind-wanders away from pain (low-IAP).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConscious Cogn
January 2025
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Coll Health
January 2025
University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA.
Reviewed empirical studies involving meditation-related interventions for college and university students during the past decade. Based on inclusion criteria, 44 studies were selected for the review and categorized into three major areas: attention, academic performance, and mental health (stress/anxiety). Areas were systemically reviewed and synthesized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
January 2025
Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Brain and Cognitive Science at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Psychology, Northeastern University. Electronic address:
The default mode network (DMN) is intricately linked with processes such as self-referential thinking, episodic memory recall, goal-directed cognition, self-projection, and theory of mind. Over recent years, there has been a surge in examining its functional connectivity, particularly its relationship with frontoparietal networks (FPN) involved in top-down attention, executive function, and cognitive control. The fluidity in switching between these internal and external modes of processing-highlighted by anti-correlated functional connectivity-has been proposed as an indicator of cognitive health.
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