Investigating relationships between mind-wandering subtypes and spontaneous EEG activity at rest

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Christine Chesebrough¹ (christinechesebrough@gmail.com), Lotus Shareef-Trudeau², Swetha Rao², Julia Kam³, Aaron Kucyi²; ¹Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, ²Drexel University, ³University of Calgary

Mind-wandering is a complex phenomenon varying on numerous dimensions and may be best considered a multidimensional construct. In the present study, we examined spontaneous electrophysiological activity in relation to several of the most prominent theorized dimensions of mind-wandering. We recorded spontaneous EEG activity from N = 41 healthy adult participants while they engaged in a wakeful eyes open resting-state (i.e., simple visual fixation) condition with intermittent experience-sampling. During experience-sampling prompts, they were presented with thought probes consisting of several questions related to the content and nature of their thoughts at random intervals between 15-45 seconds after the onset of each trial. We compared the spectral and spatial features of their EEGs on two mind-wandering dimensions of interest: whether their attention was more focused on their thoughts (mental) or sensing the world (physical) and whether their thoughts were more freely moving or unmoving. EEG recordings were preprocessed and epoched into 5-s windows prior to the thought probe onset, then time-frequency transformed and converted into scalp x frequency (1 – 30 Hz) SPM images. Comparison of mental, relative to, physical trials revealed several broadband clusters that did not survive statistical correction. Comparison of trials labeled freely moving, relative to unmoving, revealed a significant cluster of beta-band activity (17Hz) over the left temporoparietal region which survived statistical correction. These results may contribute to our understanding of the dynamic nature of attention during spontaneous cognition.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Other