MINDWANDERING AND COGNITIVE STRUCTURE
MINDWANDERING AND COGNITIVE STRUCTURE
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DOI：
10.1111/j.2164-0947.1970.tb02056.x
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发表时间：
1970-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
FORTGANG, M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
ANTROBUS, JS;SINGER, JL;FORTGANG, M
Stimulus-independent thought was subsequently defined with progressively increased precision. For example, tbe subject was told that feeling hungry does not constitute a stimulus-independent thought, but thinking of what one would like to eat does constitute such a thought. The subject was next given a series of test trials in which he was asked to state the basis of his yes or no stimulusindependent thought decision. In the final defining operation, the subject was given a series of examples that had been reported by previous subjects. He was asked, in each case, to state whether the example does or does not constitute a stimulus-independent thought. This test was continued until the subject correctly identified eight out of ten consecutive items. In the experiment proper, the subject merely pressed a button to indicate his binary decision. The stimulus-independent thought response, the major dependent variable in this research, was, therefore, a motor response and not a verbal one. Since, in the typical experiment, a subject went through 50 to 100 trials in a given condition, the dependent variable was transformed to equal the proportion of trials in which a stimulus-independent thought response was emitted. The first and most obvious question to consider is whether the process of making a perceptual response to a signal-detection task and the process of constructing stimulus-independent thoughts from events previously stored in long-term memory have any cognitive stages in common. If they share a common cognitive operator at any point, and if that operator has a limited capacity, then, as the information rate of the perceptual task is increased, a decreasing portion of the capacity of this common operator should be available for generating stimulus-independent thought. The model makes the further as-sumption that the reward or payoff for responding correctly to the perceptual task exceeds the payoff for generating stimulus-independent thought. We predicted, therefore, that in an auditory signal-detection task the production of stimulus-independent thought responses is a decreasing linear function of the information rate of the task signals.Fifty subjects were paid a fixed hourly wage plus a bonus based on the proportion of signals correctly dete~ ted.~ By varying signal presentation rate and the number of possible tones per signal, nine dif€ erent information rates (from 0.2 to 6 bits per second) were achieved for the perceptual task. Each subject completed twenty 15-second trials, with each information rate in counterbalanced order. At the end of each trial, he reported on the occurrence or nonoccurrence of stimulus-independent thoughts. The results clearly indicated that the relative frequency of the stimulus-independent thought response was indeed a negative linear function of the rate of presenting auditory information; the linear information theory rule accounts for 89% of the between-cell variance. Neither the rate of presentation of the signals nor the number of stimuli per presentation individually accounted for the treatment effect in this experiment. The fact that the product of information density and presentation, rate account for such a large proportion of the variance of the effect demonstrates that the information-processing model provides a useful way of quantifying the processes leading to the stimulus-independent thought response. That the effect is largely linear suggests that equal amounts of internally produced information are traded for equal amounts of task information. Although several subjects produced no stimulus-independent thought responses under the highest information rate of the perceptual task, the average proportion of those …
