CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN
COGNITION & NEUROSCIENCES/ConnexConnex

Mind-wandering is a mental state in which attention shifts from the present environment or current task to internally driven, self-referent mental content. Mind-wandering resembles dreaming in different aspects including phenomenological similarities regarding the content and nature of these experiences, the cognitive elements such as environmental disconnection, as well the shared neural underpinnings associated with mental experiences in wakefulness and sleep. A large number of studies evidenced the cognitive costs of mind-wandering. More specifically, mind-wandering appeared to compromise behavioral performance in a wide variety of tasks requiring sustained attention, inhibition, or executive functions. Despite the apparent burden of mind-wandering, humans spend at least one-third of their waking hours lost in such self-generated mental content. What are the benefits of such a pervasive state? Broadening the scope of attention and leveraging spontaneous, unconstrained thoughts could be beneficial, especially under cognitively less demanding task conditions, or when the goals and rules of the task are not clear. One example may be statistical (probabilistic) learning, which allows the unintentional extraction of probabilistic regularities of the environment through mere exposure and unsupervised practice. To test these assumptions we assessed an implicit probabilistic learning task measuring the ability to extract (without awareness) hidden regularities from the information stream. Participants showed superior performance in probabilistic learning during periods of mind wandering, especially when such task-unrelated thoughts occurred spontaneously without intention. Moreover, in a consecutive study, we observed that mind wandering and probabilistic learning were both associated with slow frequency neural activity, suggesting that mind wandering may reflect a transient, offline state facilitating rapid learning and memory consolidation.