Mind wandering, meaning, and action

走神是一种无处不在的认知现象，在教育、工作环境和其他日常活动中很常见。一个核心问题是，人们应该如何看待这种普遍现象。一方面，走神可以被认为是一种不受欢迎的执行控制失败。如果这是一个合理的观点，我们应该寻求减少走神的方法。另一方面，走神可能被解释为一个人心理目标优先级正常和适当变化的产物。例如，执行当前目标任务的目标可能暂时不如思考其他事情的目标重要。因此，走神可能会促进适当的甚至是必要的过程，比如计划、创造力、精神和身体的平衡。如果后一种观点是正确的，我们应该尝试描绘出在什么情况下以及在什么程度上走神是有益的。为了理清这些可能性，我们需要了解走神的本质，以及它与正在进行的认知活动之间的关系。本文提出的研究旨在通过对走神的统一理论分析来发展这样一种理解：特别是，我认为走神将资源从对意义的解释和分配转移到当前语境中。简而言之，我将其称为对手头任务的“有意义的处理”。反过来，有意义的加工涉及将当前情况与存储在记忆中的语义知识和先前经验联系起来。因此，走神的缺陷可能会发生，因为一个人进行这种所需的记忆检索的能力有限。在本研究中，这一总体理论被应用于行为控制、认知控制和文本理解中的现象。在行为控制方面，据预测，走神会干扰根据近期经验调整行为的能力；在认知控制领域，走神被认为会干扰根据指令或设定调节任务表现的能力；在文本理解中，走神会干扰知识和经验在文本记忆表征构建中的运用。本文描述了在这些领域中测试和扩展这些预测的实验。因此，拟议的研究提供了一个广泛的项目来调查走神缺陷的本质。长期目标是了解走神现象以及它如何影响认知表现。特别是，在记忆检索方面提出的理论分析提供了重要的线索，说明什么时候走神会干扰正在进行的生产性活动，什么时候不会。

Mind wandering is a ubiquitous cognitive phenomena, common in education and work environments and other day-to-day activities. A central question is how one should view this prevalence. On the one hand, mind wandering can be characterized as an undesirable failure of executive control. If this is a reasonable perspective, we should seek ways to minimize mind wandering. On the other hand, mind wandering might be interpreted as a product of the normal and appropriate variations in the levels of priority of ones mental goals. For example, the goal of performing the current target task may become temporarily less important than the goal of thinking about other things. As such, mind wandering might foster suitable or even needful processes such as planning, creativity, and mental and physical homeostasis. If this latter perspective is correct, we should attempt to delineate under what circumstances and to what degree mind wandering is beneficial. In order to disentangle these possibilities, we need to understand the nature of mind wandering and how it is related to ongoing cognitive activities. The proposed research is intended to develop such an understanding through a unified theoretical analysis of mind wandering: In particular, I argue that mind wandering diverts resources from the interpretation and assignment of meaning to the current context. As a shorthand, I refer to this as "meaningful processing" of the task at hand. In turn, meaningful processing involves relating the current situation to one's semantic knowledge and prior experience stored in memory. Thus, deficits in mind wandering may occur because one's ability to carry out this required memory retrieval is limited. In the proposed research, this overarching thesis is applied to phenomena in the control of action, cognitive control, and text comprehension. In the control of action, mind wandering is predicted to interfere with the ability to tune actions on the basis of recent experience; in the domain of cognitive control, mind wandering is predicted to interfere with the ability to modulate task performance based on instructions or set; and in text comprehension, mind wandering is predicted to interfere with the use of knowledge and experience in the construction of text memory representations. Experiments are described to test and extend these predictions in each of these domains. The proposed research thus provides a broad-based program investigating the nature of mind-wandering deficits. The long-term objective is to gain an understanding of the phenomenon of mind wandering and how it affects cognitive performance. In particular, the proposed theoretical analysis in terms of memory retrieval provides important clues as to when mind wandering will interfere with ongoing productive activity and when it will not.