The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness

Figure 1: Passive-dissipation model showing how delay can improve performance on inhibitory tasks (from Simpson et al. 2011).

Figure 2: At every age studied, children were slower and less accurate on the congruent block than on the incongruent block. That effect is completely absent in adults, who are as fast and as accurate...

Figure 3: Comparison of the mixed conditions of the Dots (now called Hearts and Flowers) and Simon tasks in percentage of correct responses (based on Davidson et al. 2006).

Figure 4: Executive functions and related terms.

Figure 1: Number of scholarly publications from 1970 to 2013 that refer to “emotion(s)/affect/mood and decision making” (green bars) and proportion of all scholarly publications referring to “decision...

Figure 2: Toward a general model of affective influences on decision making: the emotion-imbued choice model.

Figure 1: The original Baddeley & Hitch (1974) working memory model.

Figure 2: A modification of the original model to take account of the evidence of links between working memory and long-term memory (LTM).

Figure 3: The model following the introduction of a fourth component, the episodic buffer, a system for integrating information from a range of sources into a multidimensional code (Baddeley 2000).

Figure 4: My current view of the complex and multiple links between working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM).

Figure 5: A speculative view of the flow of information from perception to working memory. VSSP, visuo-spatial sketchpad.

Figure 1: Proportion of correct responses following error-generating and error-free study. Figure adapted with permission from Kornell et al. (2009).

Figure 2: Event-related potentials (ERPs) synchronized to the onset of corrective feedback given to high- and low-confidence errors made by young adults and older adults. The ERP tracings show a promi...

Figure 3: Contrast map of high-confidence errors versus low-confidence errors. Red areas were more active for high-confidence errors, and green areas were more active for low-confidence errors; both a...