[en] Mind-wandering refers to the occurrence of thoughts whose content is both decoupled from stimuli present in the immediate environment and unrelated to the task currently being carried out. Although this phenomenon has been the object of increasing interest from the scientific community during le last decade, proportionally few studies have attempted to clearly determine the form, content, and possible functions of this particular kind of cognitions. In this presentation, we will review recent evidence from studies mainly performed in our lab suggesting that most instances of mind-wandering refer to the anticipation and planning of future events and are also closely related to the processing of personal goals. More specifically, we will first discuss the findings from behavioral research that examined the phenomenological features of mind-wandering with the use of experience sampling procedures during laboratory tasks. Results of these studies mainly revealed that most of reported mind-wandering episodes are temporally oriented towards the future and that this ‘prospective bias’ can be increased when participants’ attention had been oriented toward their personal goals prior to performing the tasks. We will next review the results of neuroimaging studies that investigated the neural correlates of mind-wandering and we will more specifically focus on meta-analytic evidences suggesting that the neural correlates of mind-wandering strongly overlap with those associated with episodic future thinking and personal goal processing. Together, these results suggest that mind-wandering may have an important adaptive value and could in particular play a key role in planning and preparing for upcoming events related to the individuals’ personal goals.
Research center :
PsyNCog - Psychologie et Neuroscience Cognitives - ULiège