3 Gaining a third-person perspective on people’s first-person experience
On some occasions we simply have experiences, but at other times we reflect on those experiences; that is, we intermittently take stock of our ongoing experience and re-represent it to ourselves. This distinction between having an experience (experiential consciousness) and explicitly re-representing it to ourselves (meta-awareness) is illustrated by the example of mind-wandering while reading (Schooler 2002). All of us have had the experience of reading along and suddenly realizing that, despite our best intentions, our eyes have been moving across the page but our minds have been entirely elsewhere. Indeed this has likely happened to a goodly proportion of the readers whom have made it this far. The immediate question that this common experience raises is: why do we continue to simultaneously read and mind-wander even though we know that it is impossible to fully do both at the same time? The answer I suggest, and I’ll offer more evidence for this contention shortly, is that we routinely lose track of the contents of our own minds. People continue mind-wandering while reading because once they begin to mind-wander they often temporarily fail to notice (i.e., become meta-aware of) the fact that their minds are thinking about something unrelated to the text.
The notion that people routinely shift in perspective (from simply experiencing to attempting to re-represent their experience to themselves) provides the foundation for a framework for scientifically investigating first-person experience. Specifically, the distinction between experiential consciousness and meta-awareness raises the prospect of two types of dissociations between these vantages that are empirically tractable (Schooler 2002). Temporal dissociations of meta-awareness involve situations in which individuals engage in an experience without explicitly realizing that they are doing so. The example of temporarily failing to notice that one is mind-wandering is an example of a temporal dissociation. Translation dissociations of meta-awareness occur when one distorts or otherwise mischaracterizes their experience to themselves. Shouting “I am not angry” at the top of one’s lungs is an example of this latter dissociation. In the following discussion I briefly outline the empirical approach for exploring these two types of dissociations.
3.1 Temporal dissociations of meta-awareness
Although failing to notice that one is mind-wandering is a particularly apt example of a temporal dissociation of meta-awareness, there are numerous other examples of experiences that can temporarily go without being explicitly noticed, including unnoticed emotions (Lambie & Marcel 2002; Schooler & Mauss 2010) suppressed thoughts (Baird et al. 2013), and various mindless behaviors (Schooler et al. in press). Temporal dissociations of meta-awareness readily lend themselves to empirical investigation. Two approaches have proven effective in delineating situations in which people temporarily fail to notice a particular mental state: self-catching versus probe-catching and retrospective measures (Schooler et al. 2011).
The self-catch/probe-catch methodology pits two common self-report techniques against one another. Participants are asked to indicate every time they notice a particular mental state (e.g., mind-wandering). If an individual reports that they have just noticed themselves engaging in that mental state, then this is by definition a demonstration that the mental state has reached meta-awareness. Thus, self-caught episodes provide a straightforward measure of mental states of which individuals have become meta-aware. However, within this methodology, participants also periodically receive experience-sampling probes (Hurlburt & Heavey 2001) in which they are asked whether, at that particular time, they had been engaging in that mental state. If people are caught engaging in the state before they notice it themselves (via self-catching), this provides a metric of episodes of that state that have eluded meta-awareness. As will be detailed later, this approach has proven effective in documenting temporal dissociations of a variety of different mental states including both mind-wandering (Schooler et al. 2004; Sayette et al. 2009; Sayette et al. 2010) and unwanted thoughts (Baird et al. 2013).
A second approach for identifying temporal dissociations of meta-awareness is to rely exclusively on experience sampling probes (i.e., probe-catching) but to additionally query people when they are caught in a particular state (e.g., mind-wandering) regarding whether or not they had been previously aware of that fact. Again, as will be seen, this strategy routinely reveals that people can be caught engaging in mental activities that they were previously experiencing but were not explicitly aware of. Intriguingly, the findings with this measure of temporal dissociation align with those revealed by the self-caught/probe-caught methodology to reveal consistent systematic differences between mental states associated with meta-awareness and those that lack it.
3.2 Translation dissociations of meta-awareness
Translation dissociations correspond to situations in which, while in the process of re-representation, one omits, distorts, or otherwise misrepresents one’s mental state to oneself and/or others. The basic strategy for assessing translation dissociations is to examine the correspondence between individuals’ self-reports of their mental states and indirect measures that might reasonably be expected to correspond to that state (Schooler & Schreiber 2004). If the correspondence is high, there is good reason to think that individuals are accurately reporting their internal state. If the correspondence is low, one needs to at least be suspicious that people are mischaracterizing their mental state.
Emotions are likely to be a particularly common source of translation dissociations. For example, when individuals report experiencing anxiety, a host of physiological measures (including heart rate and galvanic skin response) typically become elevated (Marks 1987). Such correspondence gives us confidence that people are accurately characterizing their internal state; in other words, there is no translation dissociation. However, there is a class of individuals, referred to as repressors, who show the standard physiological changes when put in situations that would cause most people to experience anxiety, but who fail to report any change in anxiety (Asendorpf & Scherer 1983). In these cases, it seems reasonable to speculate that the repressors are misrepresenting their internal experience to themselves; they are experiencing anxiety but not acknowledging it (Lambie & Marcel 2002; Schooler et al. in press). As another example, consider that when males experience sexual arousal they typically show changes in their penile tumescence (a technical way of saying they become erect). Intriguingly, men who reported disgust for homosexual activity were shown to actually exhibit greater increases in penile tumescence when witnessing males engaging in sex, than men who did not report aversive feelings toward homosexuality (Adams et al. 1996). One reasonable account of these findings is that these so-called homophobics experience a translation dissociation, such that they are unable to acknowledge the arousal that they feel towards men, and instead misattribute the experience to a feeling of disdain.
A final example of translation dissociations involves situations in which individuals analyze why they feel the way they do about an affective experience. For example, in one study (Wilson et al. 1993), participants viewed various art posters and then both rated the posters and selected one to take home with them. Prior to engaging in this assessment, some participants were further asked to analyze why they felt the way they did about the posters, whereas others were not. When contacted several weeks later, people who had attempted to reflect on the basis of their preferences were less satisfied with their choice and were less likely to have hung the poster on their wall than those who had not analyzed their reasons. The disruptive effects of analyzing reasons, which have been conceptually replicated in a variety of contexts (Wilson & Schooler 1991), suggest that sometimes self-reflection may be a source of translation dissociations. That is, in the process of trying to understand why people feel the way they do, they may construct a faulty meta-conscious representation and thereby lose touch with their feelings.
3.3 Investigating temporal and translation dissociations of meta-awareness in the context of mind-wandering
In recent years, a growing body of research has addressed the nature of mind-wandering as it pertains to the occurrence of temporal and translation dissociations of meta-awareness. This research suggests that mind-wandering is highly susceptible to temporal dissociations of meta-awareness; that is, individuals routinely fail to notice that their minds are wandering despite the considerable disruption to performance that such unnoticed lapses often incur. This claim is supported by various strands of evidence revealing the frequency with which participants are routinely “caught” mind-wandering before they notice it themselves. In contrast, mind-wandering appears to be relatively resistant to translation dissociations of meta-awareness. Although individuals regularly fail to notice when their minds are wandering, when meta-awareness is directed toward the current state of thought, they are generally quite accurate in characterizing whether or not their minds were on-task. This latter claim is supported by numerous demonstrations of systematic differences in performance and neurocognitive activity as a function of individuals’ self-classifications of their mental state as on-task versus mind-wandering.
3.3.1 On the veracity of self-reports of mind-wandering: How susceptible is mind-wandering to translation dissociations?
A fundamental challenge to the investigation of mind-wandering is its necessary reliance on self-report. Mind-wandering is, by its very nature, defined in terms of internal mental states. Given psychology’s long suspicions about introspective evidence (Nisbett & Wilson 1977), this reliance on self-reports likely contributed to why, until recently, consideration of this important topic was largely limited to a few stalwart researchers (Antrobus 1999; Klinger 1999; Singer 1988; Giambra 1995). However, accumulating evidence suggests that when individuals are directly queried regarding whether they are mind-wandering, their self-reports accurately reflect their internal mental state. Evidence for this claim is largely based on the logic of triangulation (Schooler & Schreiber 2004). Accordingly, if self-reports of mind-wandering consistently co-vary with behavior and neurocognitive activity in a manner that might reasonably be expected to be impacted by mind-wandering, then we can have increased confidence that such introspective evidence accurately reflects the underlying mental state. In the following review, I detail at some length numerous findings in support of this relationship from a host of paradigms in which potential behavioral or physiological proxies of mind-wandering are related to individuals’ responses to randomly timed queries regarding whether they were just mind-wandering. This review provides a review of the extensive literature on mind-wandering and evidence for the general contentions that: 1) the concordance between behavioral and physiological measures and self-report data indicate that people’s self-reports of mind-wandering correspond to actual instances of this mental state; and 2) while people are routinely able to recognize mind-wandering after the fact, they often fail to notice it while it is occurring. Readers willing to take my word on these two points may want to scan or skip this section and jump ahead to its Summary (on page here) or to the Implications of this approach for the more general enterprise of the science of first-person perspective (on page here) if the general topic of mind-wandering is not of primary interest.
3.3.1.1 Behavioral measures
Reading comprehension
Although long overlooked as a source of reading comprehension failure, Schooler et al. (2004) found a strong correlation between the frequency of mind-wandering reports in response to experience sampling probes and comprehension accuracy. Subsequent work demonstrated that mind-wandering specifically disrupts the development of a detailed situational model Smallwood et al. 2008).
Another way in which the absence of reading comprehension following mind-wandering has been documented is through the examination of people’s capacity to detect when the text becomes gibberish. In one study (Zedelius et al. 2014) participants were asked to read simple children’s texts and report every time they noticed that the sentences no longer made any sense (some of the sentences were constructed so that the nouns of the sentences were rearranged in a nonsensical manner, e.g., “This sense makes no sentence”). The results revealed that participants sometimes continued reading for a number of sentences before noticing that the text had become gibberish. Moreover, participants who received thought probes after several sentences of gibberish were more than twice as likely to report mind-wandering without meta-awareness, relative to those who were probed at random times.
Eye-movements
If individuals’ self-reported mind-wandering episodes during reading correspond to genuine mental lapses, then we might also reasonably expect to see differences between the patterns of gaze durations following periods in which individuals report reading attentively versus mind-wandering. These predictions were confirmed in an experiment in which subjects read the entirety of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility while their eye movements were recorded (Reichle et al. 2010). Relative to eye movements obtained during intervals of normal reading, the fixations measured during intervals that preceded reports of mindless reading were both longer in duration and less modulated by variables that are known to influence fixation durations (e.g., word frequency, Rayner 1998). These results suggest that the fairly tight coupling between the mind and eye during normal reading (Reichle 2006) becomes disengaged during self-reported mind-wandering.
Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART)
Another paradigm that has proven effective in documenting the validity of mind-wandering reports is the SART task. The SART is a simple go/no-go task in which participants are asked to refrain from responding to an infrequent no-go target (Manly et al. 1999; Robertson et al. 1997). Studies have documented that the brief lapses associated with this task share important features associated with reports of off-task thought. For example, individual difference measures such as cognitive failures (Smallwood et al. 2004), depression (Carriere et al. 2008; Farrin et al. 2003; Smallwood et al. 2007), and poor executive control (McVay & Kane 2009) have been associated both with greater mind-wandering reports and more errors on the SART. Similarly, both off-task reports and errors in this task share similar information processing features in terms of measures such as reaction time (RT) and evoked response potentials (ERPs; Smallwood et al. 2008, 2004, 2007).
3.3.1.2 Neurocognitive measures
Evoked Response Potential
When the brain faces situations in which it toggles between alternative perspectives, it routinely temporarily inhibits one perspective in favor of the other. This dampening of the non-dominant perspective is shown in reversible figures, where brain activation of one interpretation is inhibited while the other is consciously experienced (Tong et al. 2006). This same process of dampening the nondominant vantage also appears to operate when people favor their internal train of thought over external events. Accordingly, reports of mind-wandering should be associated with a dampening of attention to external stimuli. Indirect support for this “decoupling hypothesis” comes from studies demonstrating that participants are more prone to errors during periods associated with self-reported attentional drifts (e.g., Carriere et al. 2008; Smallwood et al. 2004; Weissman et al. 2006) and that they are less likely to recollect external events during these periods (Smallwood et al. 2003, 2007, 2004).
More direct support for a relationship between self-reports of mind-wandering and dampened external processing comes from several ERP studies. In one study (Smallwood et al. 2008), participants intermittently received experience sampling probes while performing a simple target discrimination task. Analysis of the ERP responses to the targets revealed that the amplitude of the P3 ERP component elicited by the targets was significantly reduced for targets associated with “off-task” relative to “on-task” reports. Given that the P3 component reflects the degree to which external events are cognitively analyzed (e.g., Donchin & Coles 1988), these initial data support the proposal that mind-wandering reports are associated with an attenuation in stimulus processing at relatively late, post-perceptual processing stages.
A more recent ERP study examined whether mind-wandering might also attenuate sensory-level cortical processing (Kam et al. 2011). Participants again performed a simple discrimination task (at fixation) while being prompted at random intervals to report on their attentional state, but this time we also included task irrelevant probes in the visual periphery. The results revealed that the initial sensory-evoked response to probes was significantly attenuated prior to reports of “off-task” attentional states, as measured via the visual P1 ERP component. A second experiment that included irrelevant auditory probes similarly revealed that sensory-level auditory processing in the cortex is also dampened during self-reported “off-task” states, as measured via the auditory N1 ERP component. Another recent study from our lab (Baird et al. 2014) replicated the finding that mind-wandering reduced the P1 ERP, and further revealed that mind-wandering was associated with decreased phase-locking of electroencephalograph (EEG) neural oscillatory activity to sensory stimuli, suggesting that mind-wandering disrupts the temporal fidelity with which the brain responds to a stimulus.
Taken together, the collective ERP and EEG evidence demonstrates that self-reports of mind-wandering correspond to attenuated sensory processing and cognitive appraisals of external stimuli. This finding further confirms the validity of self-reports of mind-wandering and suggests that a central feature of the mind-wandering state is an attenuation of the processing of external stimuli.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
One of the challenges facing the burgeoning discipline of cognitive neuroscience is making sense of the observation that several brain areas, including the posterior parietal cortex and the precuneus, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the medial temporal lobe (which are collectively known as the default mode network (DMN), Raichle et al. 2001), all exhibit high levels of activity when participants have no external task to perform. One candidate process that the DMN could serve is the generation of the stimulus-independent thoughts that occur during the mind-wandering state, a hypothesis that is supported by a growing body of evidence. For example, McGuire et al. (1996) used the technique of retrospective thought sampling to demonstrate that reports of mind-wandering were associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. More recently, several studies have documented that situations associated with greater mind-wandering reports (as assessed outside of the scanner) also lead to greater activity in many of the key elements of the DMN (Mason et al. 2007; McKiernan et al. 2006).
While activity in the DMN is correlated with high probability of retrospective reported mind-wandering, it was originally unclear whether particular episodes of self-reported mind-wandering are linked to recruitment of the DMN. To assess whether this was the case, we conducted a study in which experience sampling was combined with fMRI to assess the neural activity that occurred during particular episodes of mind-wandering (Christoff et al. 2009). This study revealed that, in addition to the activation of several core structures in the DMN, areas normally observed in controlled processing (including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate) were also engaged during self-reported off-task thought. This pattern of brain activation suggests that executive and default network resources are jointly recruited during episodes of mind-wandering. One possible account explaining this joint activation is that executive network resources play a role in transforming the self-referential content supported by the DMN into the internal train of thought that we experience when the mind wanders. Further support for this hypothesis is provided by evidence that the ability to engage in autobiographical planning (such as “how do I get out of debt?”) requires cooperation between the DMN and a system involving attentional control (Spreng et al. 2010).
Christoffet al. (2009) also compared the pattern of activations associated with introspective reports of mind-wandering, on the one hand and the pattern of activations associated with behavioral errors, on the other hand. Although a variety of factors are known to contribute to behavioral errors during the SART, mind-wandering is believed to be one important source of such errors. Consistent with this view, SART errors (Figure 9) and the introspective reports of mind-wandering (Figure 10) were associated with similar patterns of brain recruitment, providing further validation for the use of introspective experience sampling reports for the study of mind-wandering.
Figure 9: Activations preceding reports of mind wandering (off-task versus on-task). Upward green arrows: default network regions; downward blue arrows: executive network regions. Regions of activation included (A) Dorsal ACC (BA32); (B) Ventral ACC (BA 24/32); (C) Precuneus (BA7); (D) Left temporoparietal junction (BA 39); (E) Bilateral DLPFC (BA 9). Height threshold P<0.005, extent threshold k>5 voxels (from Christoff et al.2009).
Figure 10: Activations preceding SART errors (interval prior to incorrect versus correct targets). Upward green arrows: default network regions; downward blue arrows: executive network regions. Regions of activation included: (F) Ventromedial PFC (BA10/11); (G) Dorsomedial PFC (BA9). Height threshold P<0.005, extent threshold k>5 voxels (from Christoff et al.2009).
3.3.2 The intermittent meta-awareness of mind-wandering: How susceptible is mind-wandering to temporal dissociations?
Although when queried individuals are quite reliable in their capacity to self-report whether or not they were mind-wandering, a variety of strands of evidence suggest that people routinely fail to spontaneously notice when mind-wandering takes place. Two paradigms, reviewed earlier, have documented the intermittent meta-awareness of mind-wandering.
3.3.2.1 Self-caught/probe-caught methodology
One approach for documenting mind-wandering in the absence of meta-awareness is combining self-catching and experience sampling measures into a single paradigm. Recall that the self-catching measure asks participants to press a response key every time they notice for themselves that they have been mind-wandering. This measure provides a straightforward assessment of the mind-wandering episodes that have reached meta-awareness. The experience sampling measure, on the other hand, randomly probes people regarding whether they were at that particular moment mind-wandering. When used in conjunction with the self-caught measure, experience sampling can catch people mind-wandering before they notice it themselves.
A number of studies have effectively used the self-caught/probe-caught methodology to illuminate the relationship between mind-wandering and meta-awareness. This approach was initially used to examine mind-wandering while reading (Schooler et al. 2004) and revealed that whereas participants regularly caught themselves mind-wandering, they nevertheless were often caught mind-wandering by the probes. Strikingly, and in support of a fundamental difference between mind-wandering episodes that are accompanied by meta-awareness and those that are not, there was a strong correlation between probe-caught mind-wandering and comprehension performance but no such relationship between self-caught mind-wandering and comprehension.
Additional studies have examined the impact of two mind-altering experiences hypothesized to undermine individuals’ meta-awareness: alcohol intoxication and cigarette craving. In one study (Sayette et al. 2009), social drinkers consumed a moderate dose of alcohol or a placebo beverage and then performed a reading task (implementing a self-caught/probe-caught mind-wandering assessment methodology). Compared with those who drank the placebo, participants who drank alcohol were more likely to report that they were “zoning out” when probed. After accounting for this increase in mind-wandering, alcohol also lowered the probability of catching oneself zoning out (i.e., self-catching). These data suggest that alcohol increases mind-wandering while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of noticing one’s mind-wandering.
In another study (Sayette et al. 2010), smokers, who were either nicotine-deprived (crave condition) or non-deprived (low-crave condition), performed the same mind-wandering task used in Sayette et al. (2009). Smokers in the cigarette-crave condition were significantly more likely than the low-craving smokers to acknowledge that their mind was wandering when they were probed. When this more-than-threefold increase in zoning out was accounted for, craving also lowered the probability of catching oneself mind-wandering. Similar to the alcohol consumption findings, it appears that cigarette craving simultaneously increases mental lapses while reducing the metacognitive capacity to notice them.
3.3.2.2 Retrospective classification of mind-wandering episodes
A second methodology that has been used to examine fluctuations in meta-awareness of mind-wandering entails combining the experiential sampling methodology with a judgment of participants’ immediately prior state of awareness. Recall that, in the experience sampling procedure, participants are intermittently queried regarding whether or not they were mind-wandering; in this combined approach, if they report mind-wandering to the probe, then they are also asked to indicate if they were aware that they were mind-wandering. In response to such queries, participants routinely indicate that they had been unaware of their mind-wandering up until the time of the probe. Moreover, when participants classify mind-wandering episodes as unaware, their performance and neurocognitive activity systematically differ from when they report having realized they were mind-wandering.
Consistent with findings using the self-caught/probe-caught methodology, retrospective classifications of unaware mind-wandering episodes (termed zoning out) and aware episodes (termed tuning out), indicate that the former are more associated with comprehension failures than the latter (Smallwood et al. 2008). By contrast, reports of zoning out seem to be most closely linked to failures in response inhibition (Smallwood et al. 2008, 2007) and to poor mental models during reading (Smallwood et al. 2008). Together these results suggest that while maintaining streams of stimulus-independent thought interfere with the integrity of external attention, the absence of awareness of mind-wandering is especially damaging to task performance.
Neurocognitive measures also reveal differences in the degree of activation between mind-wandering episodes that have been classified as aware versus unaware. In the combined experience sampling/fMRI study conducted by Christoff et al. (2009), mind-wandering with awareness activated similar brain regions to those observed during mind-wandering without awareness. These brain regions, however, were more strongly activated when mind-wandering occurred without awareness (see Figure 11). The anterior prefrontal cortex (BA10) was one of the brain regions significantly more strongly recruited during unaware episodes of mind-wandering. Notably, anterior prefrontal cortex (PFC) recruitment has been directly linked to engagement of cognitive meta-awareness (McCaig et al. 2011). The observation that this same brain region became specifically more recruited during unaware episodes of mind-wandering may seem surprising at first. However, the anterior PFC may be involved in mind-wandering through its role in the maintenance of thought. As discussed further below, its recruitment during mind-wandering in the absence of awareness may make it more difficult for meta-awareness to be implemented.
Figure 11: Mind-wandering in the (a) absence and (b) presence of meta-awareness. (a) Regions of activation associated with mind-wandering in the absence of awareness (off-task unaware versus on-task): (A) Dorsal ACC (BA32); (B) Ventral ACC (BA32); (C) Precuneus (BA7); (D) Posterior Temporoparietal Cortex (BA39); (E) Dorsal Rostromedial Prefrontal Cortex (BA10); (F) Right Rostrolateral Prefrontal Cortex (BA10); (G) Posterior & Anterior Insula; (H) Bilateral Temporopolar Cortex; (b) Similar regions were activated during mind-wandering with awareness (off-task aware versus on-task comparison) but to a lesser degree, including: (A) Dorsal ACC (BA32); (B) Ventral ACC (BA24/32); (G) Posterior & Anterior Insula. Height threshold P<0.005, extent threshold k>5 voxels (from Christoff et al. 2009).
3.3.3 Summary
In sum, the investigation of mind-wandering from the vantage of the distinction between having an experience (experiential consciousness) and explicitly realizing that one is having an experience (meta-awareness) has provided a fertile ground for developing a third-person understanding of first-person experience. This research has begun to chart the stream of consciousness, demonstrating that individuals regularly vacillate between the outer realm of perception and the inner realm of thoughts and feelings. This fluctuation routinely evades explicit meta-awareness, enabling people’s minds to move on to a new topic without explicitly realizing this fact. Nevertheless, when directly queried, people are remarkably capable of introspecting and noticing whether or not they were mind-wandering. The fluctuation of perspectives on the mind that this approach affords raises numerous questions. Here, I address three: 1) If people are so competent at recognizing that they are mind-wandering when queried, then why do they find it so difficult to notice this fact on their own? 2) Are there ways of enhancing the capacity to catch one’s mind in flight? 3) What are the implications of this approach for the more general enterprise of the science of first-person perspective? I consider these questions in turn.
3.3.3.1 Why is mind-wandering so easy to report but so difficult to catch?
The observation that meta-awareness is so effective at discerning mind-wandering when queried about it, yet so poor at catching it on its own, raises the natural question of why this discrepancy exists. Two potentially interrelated explanations may contribute to this striking discrepancy.
Like mind-wandering, meta-awareness appears to be associated with rhythms of attentional flux (Schooler et al. 2011). Sometimes we are explicitly aware of our mental states, and other times we are not. Such vacillations in meta-awareness could readily contribute to individuals’ frequent tendency to overlook episodes of mind-wandering, as this mental state may only be notable when the explicit spotlight of attention is metaphorically turned on itself. Indeed the tendency to only notice mind-wandering after the fact may similarly apply to other mental states that routinely curtail the occurrence of meta-awareness. Like mind-wandering, other subjective states such as sleep, anesthesia, dreaming, and flow states are typically not noticed while they are occurring, but are readily acknowledged after the fact. Sleep (in the absence of dreaming) and anesthesia are typically lacking conscious experience entirely and so clearly are not candidates for meta-awareness. The mental states associated with gradually drifting off to sleep and dreaming do have phenomenal content but typically lack meta-awareness. This is why people routinely don’t notice that they are falling asleep (a grave danger for driving) or dreaming (except in the case of lucid dreaming, LaBerge 1980). Another example is that of flow states (Csikszentmihalyi 1988), during which people engage in highly demanding tasks at close to their optimum level of performance. In such cases, people lack the additional resources to take stock of their experience, which may be why meta-awareness of a flow state often leads to its sadly premature termination. Nevertheless, as in the other cases, after a flow state has ended, individuals are quite able to acknowledge its occurrence. In all of these cases, the common denominator may be that these various states (for one reason or another) curtail the occurrence of meta-awareness, and thus are only noticed after the fact once the opportunity for meta-awareness reoccurs.
One reason why mind-wandering may undermine meta-awareness may stem from its reliance on the very same brain regions that may be necessary for noticing its occurrence. A striking aspect of the brain regions associated with mind-wandering is that they involve many of the systems that might be expected to contribute to the monitoring of the state. For example, elements of the medial prefrontal cortex are recruited both during mind-wandering and in tasks that require theory of mind (Gallagher & Frith 2003). As mental state attribution involves the application of meta-cognitive processes to information of a stimulus-independent nature (e.g., inferences about the mental state of another individual), the engagement of these brain regions during mind-wandering could prohibit their utility in the service of catching the wandering mind. Similarly, in the combined fMRI/experience sampling study conducted by Christoff et al. (2009), periods of mind-wandering engaged regions such as the dorsal ACC, involved in error-detection and conflict monitoring, and the anterior PFC, involved in cognitive meta-awareness. If mind-wandering engages both meta-cognition and error-detection systems in the service of generating a coherent stream of stimulus-independent thought, the fact that these systems are already engaged may make them less capable of detecting a mind-wandering episode. The observation that mind-wandering and meta-cognitive processes both engage the same systems does not necessarily establish a causal relationship between these two. Nevertheless, it remains an intriguing speculation that our persistent failure to catch ourselves mind-wandering may occur because mind-wandering hijacks the precise meta-cognitive brain regions that are necessary for noticing it. Future research might profitably explore this hypothesis by examining whether mind-wandering episodes that are experimentally induced to emphasize meta-cognitive reflection are particularly likely to evade detection.
3.3.3.2 Are there ways of enhancing people’s awareness of their mind-wandering?
One of the clear findings of research on mind-wandering is that it can be extremely disruptive to performance. Reading (Smallwood et al. 2008), working memory (McVay & Kane 2009), vigilance (Cheyne et al. 2009), and general intellectual functioning (Mrazek et al. 2012) can be seriously disrupted by mind-wandering, especially when it occurs without awareness (Smallwood et al. 2008). This raises the natural question of whether enhancing people’s meta-awareness of their minds can help to curtail the disruptive consequences of mind-wandering.
Of course, just because episodes of mind-wandering routinely end with a moment of meta-awareness (“shoot, I drifted off again”) does not mean that the meta-awareness necessarily was responsible for its ending (Schooler et al. 2011). Meta-awareness could be a consequence rather than the source of the termination of a mind-wandering episode. According to this view, the intuition that meta-awareness terminates mind-wandering episodes is another example of an over-reach of the attribution of deliberate intention (Metzinger 2013). While this remains a viable possibility, it is also the case that mindfulness techniques aimed at enhancing awareness of one’s internal states can curtail the negative effects of mind-wandering.
In one study (Mrazek et al. 2013), participants were randomly assigned to one of two interventions that they were told were expected to enhance their performance: two weeks of training either in mindfulness meditation, or in good nutrition practices. Both interventions involved similar time commitments, expectations, and homework (either daily mediation or a nutrition journal). Before and after the intervention, participants were given both reading comprehension and working memory tasks, and their mind-wandering during each was assessed. Compared to the nutrition control, the mindfulness intervention significantly reduced mind-wandering, improved performance on both tasks, and these benefits were mediated by the reduction in mind-wandering for those who were high in mind-wandering to begin with. These findings dovetail with other recent studies indicating that the general tendency for mindfulness (being present in the moment) is negatively correlated with mind-wandering (Mrazek et al. 2012), and that even a simple mindfulness exercise conducted with non-meditators (focusing on one’s breath for eight minutes) can temporarily reduce mind-wandering (Mrazek et al. 2012).
Although research on the impact of mindfulness training in dampening mind-wandering is consistent with the notion that part of its efficacy is due to enhancing meta-awareness, there is one finding that does not completely square with this account. Specifically, Mrazek et al. (2012) found that mindfulness training reduced people’s tendency to spontaneously notice mind-wandering episodes. However, this reduction in self-caught mind-wandering could have occurred because the mindfulness practice enhanced people’s awareness of the focus of their attention, thereby preventing them from initiating mind-wandering episodes in the first place. Consistent with this speculation, another recent study (Baird et al. in press) demonstrated that a similar mindfulness program can enhance at least one meta-cognitive skill, namely, the ability to assess the accuracy of memory recognition judgments. Although more research is clearly needed, it remains quite plausible that one mechanism by which mindfulness training reduces mind-wandering is by increasing people’s meta-awareness of when their minds are beginning to wander.
3.3.3.3 What are the implications of this approach for the more general enterprise of the science of first perspective? -person
The program of research outlined above demonstrates the insights into first person experience that can be gleaned by assessing it from a third-person perspective. In many respects, the approach described here exemplifies the program of heterophenomenology that Dennett advocates. We are systematically assessing people’s reports about their conscious experiences while explicitly acknowledging that those reports correspond to people’s beliefs about their experience (i.e., their meta-awareness) and not necessarily their actual experience. However, by using various reasonable markers of people’s internal states we have been able to examine the conditions under which people’s reports are more or less likely to be aligned with their experience. In this regard, we find that when people are explicitly asked whether they were just mind-wandering, their self-reports align with a host of behavioral and physiological measures that should co-vary with mind-wandering. These findings suggest that people are quite accurate in retrospectively assessing whether or not they were just mind-wandering. In other words, by triangulating between people’s retrospective self-reports of mind-wandering (following experience sampling cues) and both behavioral and physiological measures, we have identified situations in which all evidence suggests that people’s opinions about the content of their private experience is generally quite accurate.
At the same time, by introducing the self-caught procedure in combination with retrospective assessments of people’s awareness of prior states of mind-wandering, we have also documented critical lacunae in people’s knowledge of their mental states. Specifically we find that people routinely fail to spontaneously notice when their minds have wandered. When tasked with reporting mind-wandering whenever they become aware of it, people routinely demonstrate behavior indicative of mind-wandering while failing to report it. If they are probed during periods in which these measures suggest they are mind-wandering, they routinely indicate that they now realize that they were mind-wandering, but they had not noticed this state until the time of the probe. We are thus also able to identify situations in which all evidence suggests people are routinely lacking in their current knowledge of their ongoing mental state.
By triangulating between people’s first-person reports and multiple other third-person measures we have begun to reveal the relationship between people’s beliefs about their experience and empirical indices of their underlying mental states (for related approaches, see Hurlburt & Heavey 2001; Jack & Roepstorff 2002; Lambie & Marcel 2002; Lutz & Thompson 2003). Moreover, the theory of the intermittent and imperfect nature of meta-awareness as a re-representation of experience (Schooler & Schreiber 2004; Schooler 2002; Schooler et al. 2015) provides a scaffold for conceptualizing the situations in which beliefs and underlying experience converge and diverge. Of course, one could always counter that we cannot be sure that the variety of behavioral and physiological measures that correlate with self-reported mental states such as mind-wandering are necessarily indicative of those states. Perhaps there is some third variable that is responsible for both mind-wandering and the host of measures that we find to be correlated with people’s self-reporting of it. But it seems a stretch to suggest that this entirely unknown third variable could account for why, when people say they were mind-wandering, their performance on primary tasks is impaired, their eye movements become less sensitive to what they are looking at, their physiological measures indicate a dampening of attention to external processes, and their brain activation corresponds to that which occurs when they are unoccupied. In short, a strong case can be made for the value of using empirical third-person science to inform not only our understanding of people’s beliefs about their experience, but also to discern when those beliefs are likely to be accurate and when they may be inaccurate or incomplete.
It seems likely that those with strong allegiances to either an exclusively first- or third-person account of experience will balk at the notion that third-person empirical indices can be used to corroborate people’s first-person accounts. Traditional phenomenologists (e.g., Husserl 1963) may contend that first-person experience is privileged and so, when discrepancies arise between it and third-person data, that the former should invariably be favored. Those with a behaviorist bent may argue that making claims about underlying subjective states remains a dead end because ultimately they can never truly be verified. Personally I find myself sympathetic to both of the vantages; however, I argue that the striking disparity of these views, both from each other and from the one promoted here, stems from the incongruence that naturally arises from shifting perspectives.
From the vantage of one perspective of a Necker cube, the alternative perspective makes little sense. When the spinning dancer is moving in one direction, it is hard to imagine how she could possibly shift directions. Those who have never entered the third dimension of a Magic Eye image could reasonably doubt that such a perspective could possibly exist. But once one realizes that there are distinctly different perspectives to be had on a situation, and that these alternative perspectives each offer their own valuable vantage, then that knowledge can be held even as one remains incapable of experiencing both at the same time. I believe this is the case with interpreting scientific third-person accounts of first-person experience. If one is capable of recognizing both the strengths and limitations of each perspective, then they can use each to inform the other. If, however, they solely look at a problem from one or the other perspective, then this may lead to a logically consistent view, but one that omits an important vantage. I turn now to a consideration of this larger issue: namely, conceptualizing a meta-perspective that can accommodate the vacillating manner in which first-person experience is both that which we know best and understand least.