Abstract
Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants' engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength of self-referential thought as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items - was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1120-1126 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Consciousness and Cognition |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 31 Jan 2011 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2011 |
Keywords
- Autobiographical memory
- Daydreaming
- Self
- Mental time travel
- Prospective thought
- Stimulus independent thought
- Task unrelated thought
- Mind-wandering