Attention Through the Aging Process.

The three articles for this week's discussion all addressed the issue of how sustained attention changes in individuals as they age. One explored the development of sustained attention in children while the other two dealt with the question of how mind-wandering changes in older individuals as they age. Despite the fact that these two areas are rather different, they both face some of the same fundamental challenges. Conducting a longitudinal study on mind-wandering and changes in attention is difficult. Ideally one would really want to be able to test the same individuals over the course of their lifetime. Yet, it is not practical to expect that kind of committment from individuals beginning at a primary school age. Even if it were possible to achieve such a task there would certainly be testing affects and issues that derive from using the same experimental model on a set of individuals form 60 years.

The obvious solution to this unrealistic proposal is to have a large sample of participants from different age groups complete studies and then have compare that data. However, this model has it's own setbacks. This model requires a very large number of participants. In order for the results to be externally valid and really representative of  the population in that age rage a lot of other variables need to be accounted for such as the participants' demographic information.

A general issue with trying to test across age ranges is that the test and studies that are done sometimes have to differ because of the characteristics of the age group being studied. None of the studies that we have encountered this semester - which use children as participants - have the exact same model as the ones for adults. A child's impatience, irritability comprehension skills, and social and motor skills all differ from those of adults and will therefore affect the study. Essentially this is to say that between these groupings of participants there are more variables that differ than just age.

For the most part I believe the researches who lead the three studies for this week were very keen about keeping track of and trying to control for some of these differences. The first study examined how children fair on attention demanding tasks. Specifically the study "Development of Sustained Attention Assessed Using the Continuous Performance Test Among Children 6-15 Years of Age" looks at when sustained attention can really be said to develop in children. They used two versions of a Continuous Performance Test (CPT) (undegraded - clear with no interference on the screen - and degraded which had snow like interference on the screen making it harder to perceive the stimuli). The measures Lin, Hsiao, and Chen took were drawn from traditional study of sustained attention as well as signal detection theory: hit rate, false alarm rate, sensitivity, and response criteria.

In their study the researchers had a group of primary school children (6-13) and junior high school children (13 -15) and had them both complete the CPT (once undegraded and then degraded). They found that age was highly significant in the statistics that they ran. For both the degraded and undegraded CPT the hit rate increased with age while the false alarm rate decreased with age.
Importantly the researchers notieced that the relationship is not quite linear and that a quadratic model fits better. That is to say that performance on the CPT changes rapidly during early childhood and the levels off.  Also Hit rate sensitivity reaches their maximum values at higher ages for degraded sessions than for the undegraded sessions.

There are a few critical points that must be made about this study. A major problem is the fact that in order to run this study we have to assume that the existence of sustained attention is sort of binary; it either exists or doesn't. This is of course not the case. The children are seperated into two groups.  The primary or young group (6 - 13) and the junior high school group is (13 - 15). It is immedietly noticeable that the primary group has a much larger range of children's ages. This very much alters the results of the young group. Also it is important to note that age is a continum and that breaking students up into distinct ages is a fairly arbitrary practice. As evidence, take the fact that the young and the older group share an age boundary, the 13 year olds. These students then clearly straddle the boundary that the researchers were looking at and are problematic  They either bring down the measures of the older group by performing worse on their tasks or boost the young group by performing better than the younger children - or mostly likely both. It may perhaps have been a stronger choice to look at as distinct a pair of croups as possible. Maybe 8-10 and 13-15. Either way there are problems with grouping children since the development of really strong sustained attention (since we know that even at a young age children must have some sort of sustained attention skills) does not occur overnight. In order to complete their graphs and sustain their theories the researchers much make certain predictions about how their subjects would behave.  This is just one of the may issues with trying to study sustained attention as it develops.

Another interesting finding in the study, does not really pertain to their main point of interest of age related development. Lin et. al. have some interesting findings regarding sex differences in the children's completion of the sustained attention task. They notice that girls perform significantly worse than boys on the degraded CPT task. Other research failed to find a significant difference in sexes for children. To account for this difference the researchers propose two explanations. One is that the different types of CPTs used by various researchers is the cause of the inconsistency. I find this to be a big issue. I don't believe that the CPT can really be used as a consisten measure for sustain attention if the various versions of it that are in circulation can lead to such significant differences in results. They must not all be measuing the exact same things. The researchers then say that another possible reason  for the difference is somehow biological or a result of problem solving statagies. I think what is being missed here is the fact that social and cultural norms are possible huge contributors. This is particularly true if the possibility of problem solving strategies is brought up. Those are not inherently int eh DNA of the boy and girls being tested. This opens up a huge and important possibility that a component of sustained attention is socially dictated at a young age and only becomes more significant as the children grow into adults.

"Age Trends for Failures of Sustained Attention"  also looks at age differences in sustained attention by comparing young adults and older adults on the same SART task. The Carriere et. al. note that older adults tend to self-report minder wandering less than younger adults and also report being "less prone to boredom" ( Carriere et. al. 2010). Based on the observation that older individuals tend to have slower reaction times on the same tasks as younger people the researchers decided to explore the relationship between reaction time speed and the reported mind wandering and accuracy of the two groups. They note that it is unclear what the direction and/or nature of this relationship is. They note that it is possible that slower reaction time is an indicator of other effects of agin, like more cautious response style. Along the same lines I propose that it is possible that slowed reaction time is a physiological fact of aging that then requires the older individual to be more attentive to the task at hand. Also, depending on how old the individual is the slowed reaction time can also be an indicator of trying to ensure there are accidental errors when responding to the stimulus.

The researchers looked at the mean reaction time across all GO trials of the SART and found that "the decrease in SART errors was completely and uniquely explained by RT" (Cariere et. al. 2010). Rather than just leave it at that the researchers broke dow their results into age categories. These of course have the same issues as in the previous studies age category breakdown but are helpful to look at nonetheless.

The most interesting observation made by the researchers when evaluating their data is the fact that there is a linear change in the reaction times and errors as the participants age but that that task disengagement has one major decrease (meaning the participants feel more engaged in the task than the previous age category) and then remains fairly level for the remainder of the breakdowns.

On a tangential note, the researchers state that there were not sex differences between the female and male participants on any of the tasks. This is  just an interesting callback to make to the research in the  previous studies. It seem that either as a result of the design of SARTs or simply because the tasks are not demanding in the same way that Lin states the degraded CPTs do not show sex differences. I do think that this is a reason to consider the SART a better universal measure. Perhaps more analyses should be conducted between  the two testing methods to really examine how and why there might be sex differences between them and how those can be eliminated.

The final study, "Mind-Wandering in Younger and Older Adults: Converging Evidence From the Sustained Attention to Response Tas and Reading for Comprehension" more throughly examines the same subject as the Carriere et. al. study. Jonathan D. Jackson and David A. Balota  ran 4 experiments to really explore if older adults really experienced less mind wandering and if their perception of the tasks that they were asked to engage in was really different from their younger counterparts. They designed an SART task that would also probe the participant about their mind wandering during the task.


Each of the 4 experiments were variations on the same task that either had more trials or more detailed response possibilities. The final experiment included a reading task like we have previously seen in the work of Smallwood. The researchers found that age was an accurate predictor of the response time and that slower response time was related to fewer self and prob found reports of mind- wandering. They were also interested in looking at the whether or not there was a difference between the older and younger group with regards to their overall reponses to the SART. Typically when when an individual respond incorrectly on a trial  they slow down, and conversely right before an error their reactions times are a lot faster. The researchers found that there was no difference between the two groups in this regard. While seemingly non-trivial it is actually very important to establish that the two groups actually do behave the same way. It is easy to assume that two groups are the same with the exception of the variable we are interested in but that is usually not the case. The fact that they behaved the same in terms of reaction time tendencies is important confirmation that the participants all broadly have the same causes of and responses to SART errors.

One of the most interesting finding of this study to me was the confirmation that older adults tend to not find sustained attention tasks as boring as their younger counterparts. This dimension of perception is essential to the way humans interact with their environments and how they make decisions regarding the importance and value of certain experiences. I would be very interested to more studies done in this area. Perhaps older adults find more value out of the experiences that they are being asked to engage in while the young are constantly comparing the experience to something else that they could be doing. Maybe there is a component of learning to fully engage in everything that you do that comes with time. Either way there is a lot that still remains to be explored with regards to aging and attention. While experimenters do as best as they can  to run studies that cannot in fact really be randomly and completely experimentally designed, I think time and repeated experimentation are the key to solid results.



References:

Carriere,  Jonathan S.A., Cheyne, Allan., Solman, Grayden J.F., Smilek, Daniel. (2010).  "Age Trends for Failures of Sustained Attention." Psychology and Aging:25  569 - 574.

Lin, Chaucer C. h., Hsiao, Chunhding K., Chen, Wei, Chen. (1999)."Development of Sustained Attention Assessed Using the Continuous Performance Test Among Children 6-15 Years of Age." Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology: 27  403 - 412.

Jackson, Jonatan D., Balota, David A. "Mind-Wandering in Younger and Older Adults: Converging Evidence From the Sustained Attention to Response Tas and Reading for Comprehension."(2012). Psychology and Aging: 27 106-119.

Under the Influence of the Disordered and the Abnormal Studies

This weeks readings examined the effects of various disorders, brain damage, and cognitive problems on sustained attention and vigilance. The authors examined how knowledge of attention can help us understand more about the issues experienced by the participants they were examining. But the interesting question is can we use these paticular cases to learn more and make any generalizations and improvements on what we know about the mind and attention. Based on these readings it seems to me that the answer is no. In order to test the effects of brain legions or various disorders on an individual's attention studies need to be very specifically designed and monitored. For at least two of the studies I am not convinced that the results tell us anything particularly new or of interest.

The study that I found most mild and unassuming is Sayette et al.'s Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering. The aim of this experiment was to examine the effects alcohol has on sustained attention. The researchers proposed that alcohol consumption would increase the number of TUTs exhibited by the individual and  that it would make the individual less likely to notice or detect their mind wandering. They note, "environmental distractors can influence the impact of intoxication on  emotion and behavior  but in addition alcohol may affect sensitivity to  distraction" (Sayette, 747). To test this the experimenters used two conditions: one in which the men participating in the study were given an alcoholic drink to consume and another in which the control group of men were served a placebo drink.

This study had a number of very well thought out design choices. For example using a placebo rather than a non drinking group was ideal. Likewise their control of the sex, weight, drug use, and food consumption of their participants was excellent. Additionally I thought that using both a probing and self report method in order to take note of how often the individuals caught themselves mind wandering versus were simply discovered to be mind wandering  was a smart measure to take. Despite all these things I think that the amount of alcohol used in the experiment was hardly enough to test their theories. The drink that they gave their participants was exactly one standard drink. The BAC levels of the experimental group was well below the NYC intoxication driving limit, implying that the affects of the alcohol would be minor.

In terms of the performance on the comprehension task taken after the reading, the placebo group performed only "marginally" better than the drinking group. This peeked my interest. If the group performed just as well on the comprehension of War and Peace 
then I don't really understand how there could have been such significant differences on actual mind wandering. I would be really interested in seeing a similar study done, perhaps with more alcohol (maybe in multiple stages) with the participants in an fMRI. The study done by Seyette doesn't seem to have enough answers to the questions he proposed and to the results he discovered. Particularly since the two groups were similar in the frequency with which he alcohol drinking participants reported TUTs was the same as placibo participants in spite of the fact that the former group was caught in those states a lot more often.

The way the researchers speak about alcohol decreasing perceptual abilities makes me think that perhaps there is a default/ standard way in which people percieve their mind wandering unless otherwise prompted. Meaning that unless individuals actively know that they are performing poorly on a task or are for some reason hyper aware of their thoughts and perceptions (which people who have consumed alcohol are not) perhaps we tend to report some seemingly average figure. And perhaps this ceases to be true after a significant amount of alcohol is consumed. If the person in the study we're intoxicated then wouldn't they perhaps be completely willing to say that they have mind wandered.

I was also disappointed by the lack of discussion regarding the social placebo effects of alcohol. By not having an additional group that were not given any sort of drink (placebo or not) I think the experimenters missed an opportunity to really examine the effects of social perception of drinking on sustained attention.


The article Depression, rumination and the default network by Berman et. al., while interesting did not seem to me like something that could be extrapolate to a wider understanding of Mind Wandering but rather a very specific, if sometimes incomplete, look at depression. As the article went on I actually felt that we were focusing more on learning more about the default network than specifically depressed individuals and their behavior when it comes to sustained attention tasks and the default network. This distracted me. I felt that it was not really in the interests of the questions the study was posing and that it was loosing track of the question it sought to explore. Early in the paper Berman et. al. state that " examining how individuals with MDD and healthy controls compare during such rest periods is important because interleaved with ongoing tasks of like are significant periods in which people do not engage in structured tasks, and instead are left to mind wander or ruminate" (Berman 448). By design the study is intended  to explore this issue.

The experiemnters took a sample of depressed individuals and first tested their non-task fixation periods. This was done at the beginning and end of each run and is one of the most significant part of the experiments since it demonstrates that there was more default network connectivity during unguided rest periods.

The following is a depiction of the activity in MDDs and HCs (healthy controls):

Overall what this study tells us is that when working on task MDDs and HCs essentially show the same activity. The major differences are seen when the individuals are at rest. So it is possible that there is a connection between and highly active Default Network and rumination in depression. However a major issue for me here is the direction of this correlation. There is also an issue with just placing MDDs in one category. There are several common characteristics of depression but the behavior of each MDD is not necessarily the same and the interaction between those characteristics and the studies of rumination that the researchers took is not quite satisfactory to be a point of making big generalizations. What is really promising about this research is that indicates that there might be reason to have more behavioral therapy for depression rather than, or in addition to, drugs.


The article Default Mode Network Connectivity Predicts Sustained Attention Deficits after Traumatic Brain Injury by Bonnelle et. al. was a  fascinating read. I was really interested by the fact that before a task is even performed the amount of  connectivity of the precuneus with the rest of the DMN can indicate which patients will show impairment of attention. If any article had applications beyond the study of disorders of the mind and attention, it was this one. The design is still very specific and oriented toward a very specific scope but studying of the correlation between those brain regions in healthy controls as well as possibly in the developing brains of children could help psychologists lean more about what sustain attention works in opposition to in the mind.




When the experimenters ran their study they found that the vigilance decrement in their experimental patients varied while the ones of the controls were fairly consistent. Besides being interesting in its own right this fact gives me courage that the applications of the discoveries made on these individuals brains might be more widely applicable.

This study also determined that the over the course of the experiment the activation and deactivation was similar for the patients and for the controls. This provides us with reason to believe that unlike with certain (albiet few) other tasks performed after brain injury, networks involved in attention do not really reroute elsewhere. Attention is not a very plastic task and requires very certain brain resources.


Finally the article by Manly et. al. "The Differential Assessment of Children's Attention: The Test of Everyday Attention for Children" was an important step to make in terms of research areas. However it really just demonstrated how difficult it is to examine the children's minds. This article was perhaps the one that would be most difficult to generalize from. To begin with the minds of developing children are very complex in nature. And studying attention  in children  is particularly difficult. Even with adults  attention is hard to isolate because as humans we are constantly attending to something. Therefore it might be even more true for the  learning and developing brain of a child. The biggest danger here is I think to try and compare the children's results to anything we have encountered so far in the class with adults. (At least in a definite and certain way).

I had questions about the tasks that the children were asked to perform. In one instance they are asked to do a tone counting experiment. From what we have learned in the past increasing the working memory load of an participant will keep him or her from mind wandering. If we assume that this is true of children's minds as well this task is flawed by asking the child to keep something in their wokring memory. While it is not a very complex computation, I do not feel adequtly reassured that this wouldn't have an affect on the children in the study.

This and other of the studies we looked at for this week have hade me question their design. It is difficult to design an experiment for an abnormal mind in a similar if not more complex way that for a healthy one. Each have very specific needs and requirements, must have certain controls and tests, and may not really be looking for the same things.  Many advances have been made in psychology through case studies or pseudo-experiments with atypical minds and traumatic brain injuries but no definite conclusions can really be drawn on the basis of one study. At most it is a opening to delve deeper into the field and the particular topic of interest.





References:


Berman MarcG., Peltire, Scott.,  Nee, Derek Evans., Kross, Ethan., Deldin, Patricia J., Jonides, John. (2011). "Depression, rumination and the default network." SCAN: 6 548 - 555.

Bonnel, Valerir., Leech, Robert., Kinnuen, Krisi M., Ham, Tim E., Beckmann, Christian F., Boissezon, Xavier, De., Greenwood, Richard J., Sharp, David j.. (2011) "Default Mode Network Connectivity Predicts Sustained Attention Deficits after Traumatic Brain Injury." The Journal of Neuroscience: 31 13442-13451.

Manly Tom, Nimmo-Smith, Ian., Watson, peter., Andersn, Vicki., Turner, Anna., Robertson, Ian H. (2001). "The Differential Assessment of Children's Attention: The test of Everyday Attention for Children". Child Psychology 42 1065- 1081.

Sayette, Michael A., Reichel, Eric D., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2009).
"Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering." Psychological Science 20 747 - 752

Meditation and the Mind

The most exciting thing to me about the exploration of meditation as a possible means to increase mindfulness and reduce mind wandering is that it is a practical approach to a problem everyone experiences. Unlike some of the studies we've looked at in this class on mind wandering and vigilance many of this weeks readings proposed that through meditation individuals could train certain aspects of their mind and behavior to better handle attention demanding situations.  Eastern practices often receive a lot of skepticism but meditation is a very popular activity, and therefore makes it an perfect area of study. The question, however, remains whether or not the practice is actually effective and accomplishes what it says it does. 

Based on past meditation experiences and on the introductory class that I attended I certainly believe that meditation relates to the training of attention. In a way it is almost counter intuitive. One may think that practicing vigilance tasks or altering environments to better suit the attention demanding task is the way to go. However this weeks reading explore the benefits of meditation. Often practiced in a calm and peaceful environment with no pressure to be correct or achieve perfection meditation seems to a way into gaining more control over our minds. 

The class I went to was a lot like some of the  other meditation that I have done. We sat in comfortable sitting postions on the floor and we were instructed to focus on our breathing. Not to try and controle our breathing or change it but to take note of it and clear our minds of anything else. To some extent I would say that this meditation practice is a combination of Focused Attention (FA) and Open Monitoring (OM) Meditation as described by Lutz et. al. in  Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation. This paper provides a very solid background for thinking about the psychological benefits of meditation. Thought this piece is not an experiment it contains a lof of scientific thought about types of meditiation as "regulatroy training regime for the mind" (Lutz, et. al.163) 

Lutz first breaks down the two main types of meditation mentioned before FA and OM. He then discusses more of what the possible connection between meditation and sustained attention training might be. The authors note that it is generally agreed upon that ability to focus attention requires a lot of skills like monitoring ability, detecting distraction, redirecting the energy associated with that distraction, etc. They propose "that the specific neural systems associated with conflict monitoring and sustaining attention, are involved in inducing and sustaining a state of FA meditation (Lut, 164). The authors also predict that meditation training will also produce long term changes in brain function. 


There were several interesting findings in the research the authors presented. First is the inverted U shape curve that expert meditators showed in brain scans. For a certain period of time, the more time individuals have spent in meditation, the more the brain regions associated with monitoring were activated-then the activation decrease. Once they reach a critical point scans actually indicated less activation. This implies (thought not empirically proven) that concentrative meditation may lead to the de-habituation of a task. This means that the task is no longer being hevily and automatically processed by the brian. This type of meditation is also associalted with a decrease in reaction to certain emotions.  The control of this activation may be a partial cause of this trend. Additionally it is possible that with time individuals no longer need to excerpt as much energy to and as many resources as a more novice person. 

One of the most  interesting aspects of the study was that "OM meditatios showed superior performance on a sustained attention task in comparison with FA meditator when the stimulus was unexpected." There was no difference between the groups when the stimulus was expected. This says a lot about what each type of mediation trains the individual to do. In FA meditation you must focus on one thing and you must be aware when your attention  slips elsewhere. This is an exciting possibility regarding what kind of training and what kind of tasks people working on different jobs/ in different positions might need.

It is also possible that there is a confound. Perhaps there is some third variable that is no being caught. It hard to tell in studies like this what the cause of certain brian activity patterns are. People who meditate do not do so simply for the cognitive development opportunities. They do it because it gives them a sense of peace and is a possible way to de-stress.  Isn't it possible that the reason performance is so much better has to do with factors influenced by meditation but not the meditation itself. A further question that I have about this paper is the assertion that it is possible to determine brian activity during non mediation. The fact of the matter is that meditation is really just practice in going about attentional tasks in a certain way. It involves peace and calm and rational paced thought. Perhaps individuals who have reached a certain level of meditational experience go about all tasks in the way they go about meditation. Like learning a skill and then applying it to all your work. It is not even necessarily done consciously. This would make it difficult to test these individuals in a non meditative environment. 



MacLean et. al.'s article Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention had some very interesting things to say about meditation as a means of training your mind. One interesting piece of theory that motivated this study is that "some forms of training can improve performance on untrained attention tasks" (MacLean, 829). This is interesting because it seems contradictory to some of the research we had previously read about habituation and participants becoming too familiar with a task to be interested in it. The intention of this statement is that certain types of training that hone in on skills needed for cognitive tasks can later help improve performance on those cognitive tasks. This is a bit opposed to my earlier statement about it being somehow different from simply practicing an attention demanding task. While it does very much change what meditation is, I do think that this duality - it's ability to both train for an attention demanding task while not placing the individual in the same stress inducing circumstances - very interesting. 

This study made predictions about what type of help meditation training could provide in attention decrements. Using the theory that one of the main causes of  vigilance decrement  is hight resource demands, MacLean et. al. proposed that meditation would specifically help with this aspect of the decrement "by reducing the demands associated with discriminating difficult targets" (MacLean, 830). The study they ran seems remarkably costly not only for them but for their participants. This is my major concern with the design of the experiment  All of the participants who were a part of the experiment had to pay approximately $5,000 for their own room and board at one of two centers. This is regardless of whether or not they were selected for the experimental group. this severely limits the pool from which the experimenters were testing. They account for handedness and psychological criteria when randomly assigning the two conditions but factors like soci-economic status, cultural background, etc are absent. Perhaps these criteria play a much larger role in how the participants responded to the meditation. 

thought the various things that the experimenters tested for get complex, they concluded that training- related impprivements in perception can decrease resource demands and thus improve performance. However it is my opinion that the design of the study did less to test the value of meditation and more to test the significance of discrimination and perceptual difficulty on attention demanding task.  With that aside this does fall in line with what I experienced during my meditation session. I do think that meditating for longer periods of time would make an individual feel more at ease with the load of a task. Once calm and centered they may find themselves more prepared to work calmly through a task. 

The final article of the week, "Mindfulness Training Affects Attention - OR Is It Attentional Effort", designed a study that more carefully explored this mindedness. They had participants randomly assigned to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction condition (MBSR), non-mindfulness stress reduction (NMSR), or an inactive control group. They hypothesized that the MBSR condition would improve sustained attention and were proven correct by their experiment. Their tests indicated that mindfulness meditation and nonjudgmental attitude are both important elements of MBSR.  Overall  I thought this was an excellent experiment that really broke down the experimental evidence that it was looking for. 

However one thing that again bothered me, just as it had in other studies, is the fact that there is no discussion about the possible cultural and social aspects of meditation and how that may affect results. By reaching out to participants to take part in a study on mediation the pool was only filled with people who were interested in and thought that meditation might be useful or at least fun to try. They was no exploration of what perception may do to influence participation or ability. I met someone at my class who had gone to meditation classes before and was talking to another individual about how she just couldn't get a hang of the meditation.  The way the studies are described seems to indicate that everyone succeeded and enjoyed their sessions. Were there any people who felt they "couldn't" do it? And if so...what does that mean about  their mindfulness and attentional abilities. 

Overall  really enjoyed this topic and I do thing meditation is a useful way to try and help individuals with sustained attention development. While we have evidence that certain tasks are much more difficult to attend to, sometimes there is no way around that. The task that inspired vigilance studies - the radar blips- were and in some instances are still very important systems. They may be small amendments that can be made to reduce the demands on the individual attending to it, but the job and the apparatus are what they are. 

1. References:

Baer, Ruth A., Smith, Gregory T., Hopkins, Jaclyn.,  Kreitemeyer, Jennifer., Toney, Leslie. Using Self- Report Assessment Methods to Explore Facets of Mindfulness. (2006) Assessment 13 27-45.

Jensen, Gade Christian., Vangkilde, Singe., Frokjaer, Vibe., Hasselbalch, Steen G. Mindfulness Training Affects Attention - OR Is It Attentional Effort? (2012). Journal of Experimental Psychology 141 106-123. 

Lutz, Antoine., Slagter, Heleen A., Dunne, John D., Davidson, Richard J. Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation. (2008). Trends in Cognitive Science 12  163-170. 

1. MacLean, Katherine A., Ferrer, Emilio, Aichele, Stephen R.,  Bridwell, David A.
   Zanesco Anthony P., Jacobs, Tonya L., King, Brandon G., Rosenberg, Erika L., 
Sahdra, Baljinder K.,  Shaver, Phillip R., Wallace, B. Alan., Mangun, George R., Saron, Clifford D. Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention. 

(2010). Psychological Science 21  829-830. 

The Possibilities of the DMN

This weeks readings provided a new angle for thinking about Mind Wandering. Rather than examine what the effects are and what the possible implications are the studies this week examined the cognitive implications of default network activity. I found all of the research interesting, however not all of them we equally convincing. 

As explained by all the authors, Default Neural Activity occurs in an area of the brain (made up of many smaller regions) know as the Default Neural Network (Also known as Default Mode Network). This activity is most frequently noted while the indivual is at rest and not performing an attention demanding task - one that does not call very much on their executive control (Mason et. al., 394). It seems that when an individual becomes engaged in an attention demanding task this DMN activity lessens. However this explanation is more complex and dependant on the way one interprets a lot of research. There is some disagreement among  researchers as to what the DMN's role actually is. Some believe that rather than simply activate during non attention demanding tasks, the DMN in some way monitors the way we take in our environment. It is not as black and white as either doing a task 100% or not. Furthermore other researchers from this week have additional theories as the the manner in which the DMN functions, though upon initial reading I thought these were small differences in semantics, I actually think many of the ideas presented in these articles work well together to make sense of a complex concept.  

The most compelling and comprehensive article for me was Stawarczyck et. al.'s "Neural Correlates of Ongoing Conscious Experience:  Both Task-Unrelatedness and Stimulus-Independence are related to Default Network Activity." Stawarczyck did an excellent job of presenting the complexity of the topic while still maintaining a clear study and exploring the possible implications. The main issue that he addresses is the question of the active role of the DMN. One theory is the one initially mentioned, "higher FMN activity corresponds to a shift of perspective from current external information to internally generated cognitions." The other explored by Stawarczyck states, "DMN activity might support the general unfocused monitoring of the external environment rather than internal thoughts" (Stawarczyck et. al., 1). 

Stawarcyzyck theorizes that inorder to properly test thins, experimenters cannot simply try and measure Task-Unrelated thoughts, or Mind Wandering, and so he creates a much more specific and valuable system. He categorizes thoughts during a task into 4 categories which take in two paramaters. Whether they are stimulus dependant or independent and whether the thoughts are task related or unrelated. According to Stawarcyzyck et. al's plan this will allow them to evaluate each of these types of thoughts separately and monitor the brain regions accordingly. 

Stimulus- dependent & Task-related means that the individual is completely focused on the task at hand. 

Stimulus-dependent & Task-unrelated means that the individual is engaging with a stimulus in the room that is not part of the task and should not be looked on. 

Stimulus-independent & Task-related means that the individual is thinking about the task they are doing but is not engaging with any stimuli in the room - this is a more internally directed thought flow. 

Stimulus independent & Task-unrelated is the only classification of Stawarcyzyck's that counts as mind wandering because the individual is neither thinking about task nor distracted/engaging with stimuli in the room. 

Stawarcyzyck measured and compared the brain activity of individuals who reported to be in hese distinct categories when prompted during an attention demanding task.  This is a step toward a solution to an issue of categorizing mind wandering that has come up several times throughout the class and does a nice job of explaining some of the difference in neural activity between stimulus-dependent imaging and stimulus-independent imaging. 

The experimenters essentially found the results they participants perform better when reporting that they have stimulus-dependent and task-related thoughts and this coincided with decreased activity in the DMN. However the interesting further step of this study allows for a complication of the function of the DMN. Rather than just state that in general the DMN leads to more internal thoughts that are unrelated to environment, the DMN had specific areas spike for task-unrelated thoughts and different spikes for stimulus-independent thoughts. This is importnat because it leads t the possibility that there is an additive quality to the DMN. It is not simply black and white on and off but rather more a  spectrum of mind wandering.  The more the regions activate the more the individual may mind wander. 

This possibility seems the most likely to me after all the readings, but contrasts in an interesting way with the Fox reading. In "The human brain is intrinsically organized into dynamic, anticorrelated functional networks" Fox et. al. focused more on the dichotomy between the default network where they state "task-negative"responses are and the "task-positive areas of the brain which activate when an attention demanding task is being performed. Fox et. al. look at this relationship a lot like one would picture a seesaw. 

The resting state of the human mind is a highly active default network which allows for a lot of mind wandering. When a task demands out attention the activity in the DMN (or task negative area) dies down and simultaneously the activity of the task positive areas increase. As one moves up or down the other moves inversely to accomodate it. 

This is a very on or off approach to the default network and is not quite in line with Stawarcyzyck's proposal. The latter allows for fluidity and shades of gray while the former is very black and white. Nevertheless Fox's proposal's accounts for the resource allocation theories that had come up in the past by researchers like McVay. Instead of assuming that there are a finite number of cognitive resources that can be attributed to attention demanding tasks, Fox asserts that once the task positive or task negative area of the brian is being called upon the seesaw must tip and activate it. 

The evidence for Fox lies in the fact that the relationship between the two brain regions exists even when an individual is not explicitly working on a task. It is just a natural function of the human mind. This again is somewhat at odds with Stawarcyzyck  who would say that activation of the DMN becomes more intense in accordance with the small subsections of the region that are activated (Stawarcyzyck et. al., 9). 

The Mason et. al. article "Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought" addressed a question similar to Fox et. al.'s are areas activated during rest implicated in mind wandering? The assertion here is that simply because the area is activated does not mean that it is the cause of mind wandering. In this study they induced a state of  mind wandering during blocks of verbal and visiospatial tasks, checked that the activations areas were associated with the DMN, and checked against participant self reports of mind wandering. The study concluded that "the tonic activity observed in the default network during conscious resting states is associated with mind wandering" (Mason et. al., 394). 

Aside from the lack of detail in this article, I was most unsatisfied by the assertion that "a significant positive relation between the frequency of mind-wandering and the change in BOLD signal observen when participants performed "practiced: relative to "novel" blocks" (Mason et. al. 394). Perhaps it is just due to the lack of detail provided but I am unsure how a probe/ sampling method of the participants can indicate more SITs. When probed the participant either reports a SIT or does not. If the researchers probed 10 times and received 6 instances of SITs and then did the same number of probes, they still cannot be sure what is happening between probes. Perhaps the individual reports 8 SITs simply because they are mind wandering at different times during the task. 

For me the least compelling of all the studies was the Andrews-Hanna article, "Evidence for the Default Network's Role In Spontanous Cognition." It seemed redundant and over ambitious in terms of goals and essentially demonstrated thing that other articles had done more efficiently. Despite this, I thought the design of the study was at times clever and interesting. It was just a struggle to understand the theoretical intentions of the experiments and once those intentions were understand I found I was disappointed and uninterested. 

There were three main conditions in the experiment. 1) External Attention where participants were told to look for brief flickers on a surface to which they should attend. The flickers would occur on the peripheries of their vision. This was the broad condition 

2) was also external attention with the alteration that the flickers would occur on the central part of the screen making this the focal condition. 3) Passive/Spontaneous Cognition Condition participants were asked to look at a corsshair on the center of a screen knowing that there would be no stimulus. 4) There was also a control condition in which a set of participants completed the tasks and were prompted for information about their mind wandering while in a fake fMRI machine. This allowed the experimenters to get real time information from the subjects without disrupting the scan. 

The experimenters were testing multiple things in this experiment. The first being if the DMN is used for general external attention by comparing the scans of conditions 1 and 2 to condition 3. Then they tested if the DMN is important for borad external attention by comparing activity on the brain scans of conditions 1 and 2. Finally they tested if the DMN is for internal meditation or thought by checking if DMN activity is weakest in the external attention conditions. The results indicated that the the last hypothesis was correct and had the most statistical significance 

The most interesting results to come from this experiment was the fact that thought the broad focus condition did not achieve anywhere enar as many SIT repots, it did have more than the focal condition. 

This result is interesting in so much as it again somewhat goes against the Fox et. al. black and white view of the DMN. There seems to be a continuum along which mind wandering occurs and not simply an easy switch. I  therefore hold on to my support of the Stawarcyzyck et. al. study. 

References: 

Andrews-Hanna, JR., Reidler JS., Huang C., Buckner RL. (2010). Evidence for the
Default Network's Role In Spontanous Cognition. J Neurophysiol: 104 322-335.  

Fox, Michael D., Snyder, Abraham Z., Vincent, Justin L., Corbetta, Maurizio., Van Essen, David D., Raichle, Marcus E. (2005).  The Human Brain is Intrinsically Organized Into Dynamic, Anticorrelated Functional Networks. PNAS: 102  9673-9678.

1. Mason,
Malia F., Norton, Michael I., Van Horn, John D., Wegner, Daniel M.m Grafton, Scott T., Macrae, C. Neil. (2007). Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought. Science: 315

Stawarczyk D., Majerus S., Maquet P., D'Argembeau A. (2011)  Neural Correlates of Ongoing Conscious Experience:  Both Task-Unrelatedness and Stimulus-Independence are related to Default Network Activity.  PLOS ONE: 6 2. 

There is Nothing Either Good or Bad, but Thinking Makes It So

Given the that we've established that all people mind wander and that we are very often unaware of our mind wandering, the question "Does mind wandering make up more or less happy," is a substantial one. This week's articles very practically examine the effects of mind wandering on individuals rather than simply assume it is a negative experience and suggest solutions. This week's readings ask the necessary questions: Does it make us happy, does it sadden us, does it make us less competent?

Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert believe so. In their article entitled "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind" their stance is clear - mind wandering causes unhappiness. Their study has some clever design elements. Through the use of an iPhone app, they managed to make experience sampling an inexpensive and efficient method of gathering data. Experience Sampling calls for asking people to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions when questioned, at random moments throughout the day. The iPhone app really does seem like the ideal manner to efficiently, cheaply  and quickly gather this data. Furthermore, I appreciated the care the experimenters took to ensure that the questions they asked participants did not influence their answers to the next questions. By ensuring that "the happiness question was always asked before the mind wandering question, and that the mind wandering question was asked before the question about current activity, participants were less likely to have one answer inform the next (Killingsworth).

The results/discoveries found in the study are likewise very straight forward. I was particularly interested in (and would like to possibly further explore) the fact that mind wandering frequencies in this study were "considerably higher" than typically seen in laboratory environments (Killingsworth, 932). This discovery merits further study since in may influence the interpretation and critiques of the conclusions of many studies which we deem foundational. If this experience sampling found such a large discrepancy in mind wandering reports, there are more problems with laboratory design of experiments on this topic than previously thought.

In addition to the large report of mind wandering Killingsworth found that the nature of people's activities had very little consequence on whether or not their minds wandered and that people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were not.

That last assertion is where I become skeptical of this study. Killingsworth et. al. claims that "although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering, time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in [their] sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (932). In the online supplement to their article they further discuss how they arrived at that conclusion and, to me, it is not nearly satisfactory. It seems like the two researchers are making a basic mistake and concluding that a correlation indicates causation. There is definitely a third variable problem here which they are not adequately accounting for. Mind wandering does not need to be the cause of the unhappy mood. Rather an unhappy mood can easily be the cause of the mind wandering or something completely different! Killingsworth et. al. try to dismiss this possibility by saying that "mind wandering was strongly related to whether [a participant] had been mind-wandering in the previous sample, but was unrelated to the whether they were mind wandering in the next sample" (Killingsworth).  This is an absurd claim to make considering that the participants were not providing samples nearly frequently enough. He states that the iPhone application was defaulted to probe the participant 3 times a day. Though he never clarifies what the average number of probes was, we can assume that it was somewhere in that range. Since these probes are evenly divided throughout the participants waking time it is silly to assume that the person will consistently be experiencing the same emotion during each prompt or instance of mind wandering. A full 5 hours may go by before prompted again the feelings associated with that distant mind wandering moment hardly seem to be enough to cause the participants mood.


In "Why does Working Memory Capacity Predict Variation in Reading Comprehension?" Jennifer McVay and Michael Kane, look at individual difference between participants to try and pin down what makes some people better at reading. They approached this by looking at:
 1) lapses of attention to the task (in the form of TUT) during reading and other  tasks that demanded attention.
 2) performance measures on simple attention tasks and determining whether they are helpful for predicting comprehension.
 3) examining a variable known to predict working memory capacity and seeing if attention control plays a part in the relationship.

This study is based on past research that suggests that "readers with lower WMC had les capacity to integrate information form the text and from background knowledge into a working mental model" (McVay et. al., 303). McVay et. al.'s hypothesis runs off of this and states, "that the one mechanism responsible for the dynamic memory processes involved in reading is executive attention" and that individual differences in attention control are partially responsible for the connection between WMC and comprehension" (McVay et. al. 303). The experimenters measured TUTs or mind wandering during two task types, attention - control and reading comprehension. Here McVay is looking to take one step closer towards establishing a cause and effect relationship.

She and team discovered that subjects were significantly less accurate on occasions when they reported TUTs than when they reporte on-task thoughts on Stroop incongruent trials but were numerically more likely to answer reading comprehension questions correctly despite reporting on task thinking. They write it off as merely a statistical consequence of yes no questions, however, I believe that is a cop out. They conclude that their hypothesis was correct and "mind-wandering vulnerability mediates the relationship between individual differences in the WMC/attention control and reading comprehension. The results for the most part suit their hypothesis but this does not. It implies that there is possibly a difference between reading comprehension and other types of attention demanding tasks. While this is not the aim of their study it does raise questions about the how their theory may be influenced by other specific attention demanding tasks.

This study is not a direct response to the the question of what the quality or emotional response to mind wandering is for an individual, but it does very clearly indicate that individual differences in mind wandering exist and are significant. It does not ask for reports on how or how much each participant feels their mind wandering affects their lives, but that would perhaps be the next step. Now that we know that there is a difference, we could explore how that difference really, practically and (perhaps) emotionally affects participants.

In "Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation," Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood et. al., conducted a study on the implications of mind wandering. They specifically looked at "creative situations" which required participants to solve previously encountered problems after an "incubation period" during which they were asked to complete another task.

For the experiment the participants were prompted to think of as many unusual uses for a given item as possible. The following is the breakdown of the experimental conditions.

bold and italics row  represents the "incubation period"

Their results were in line with previous studies done by Smallwood and Schooler. Tasks that required little working memory allowed for more TUTs / Mind Wandering. There was no difference in accuracy between the demanding and undemanding task groups. Now to the main point, "participants who engaged in an undemanding task during the incubation interval displayed greater improvement in UUT tasks" (Baird et. al. 1120). There was no significant incubation effect- meaning there was no difference observed between participants who received no break, those who did an undemanding task, or those who rested. Therefore the Baird et. al. data support the theory that specific types of unrelated though facilitates creative problem solving. Clearly Baird et. al. are in favor of mind wandering, however, it is in a very specific context. Having just been presented with a challenging, creative problem, participants will inevitably mind wander on that. In a different context however, mind wandering might come to a more fruitless end. The problem is not the mind wandering itself but the seemingly randomness/ out of control nature of the wandering.


In "Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming," Delaney and Sahakyan discuss a study which developed the diversion paradigm.  This model has two groups. The experimental condition group studies a list of items, engages in "diversionary thought," studies a second list of items, and then does a free- recall test to name as many items as they can. The control group did the same with the exception of the "diversionary thought." The study found that participants who engaged in "diversionary thought" remembered significantly fewer items than the control group. This study and the subsequently developed context-change account (a theory that proposes that a divisionary thoughts set up new mental contexts) are the corner stones of the Delaney and Sahakyan study. Their hypothesis is that "when people imagine an event, they mentally travel to and immerse themselves in the context of that event. Consequently, a diverting imagined event can disrupt and change one's mental context, creating a contextual-mismatch with ongoing reality" (Delaney et. al. 1037). Additionally they propose that "the degree of forgetting should depend on how different the current context is from the imagined context" (Delaney et. al. 1037).

The results of the experiment showed significant forgetting. The near-change and the control groups did not differ significantly. 

Delaney and Sahakyan completed a second experiment designed almost exactly like the first. This time participants had all recently taken a vacation and that vacation was used as the subject of the diversionary thoughts. The experimenters hypothesized that the participants who had taken and were asked to mind wander on their international vacations (far-change) would miss more list 1 words than participants who had taken and were told to think about the vacations they had taken within the USA (near-change). 

As can be seen in this figure, their hypothesis was correct. "Participants in the control condition recalled more List 1 words than those in the near-change condition, who in turn recalled more words than the participants in the far change condition. Thus, thinking about an international vacation was associated with greater recall impairment than thinking about domestic vacations. 

An important thing to note is that the experimenters also established that the amount of forgetting (in experiment 1) was directly related to the amount of time since they lived in their parents house and (in experiment 2) forgetting was directly related to how far away the vacation location was; the longer and the further away, the more forgetting. 

Generally I thought this was a very strong study and I was very interested by their theories,  methods, and conclusions. However, I take issue with some of the foundations of the theories the experimenters were using. While it is true that the context in which one learns information becomes salient to the recall of that information, I am unclear how these experiments 100% match that theory. The context that the participant are being asked to recall is indeed distant from their present one, but they are not necessarily ever leaving their present context. Having someone draw their home or think about a vacation does not remove them from the fact that they are in a lab partaking in an experimental study. 

Delaney and Sahakyan also stated that "according to context theories, people forget not because of the passage of time per se, but rather because of the drift in context, which correlates with the passage of time" (Delaney 1037). Though this seems intuitively true, it seems even more intuitive to me that each recall of the information learned add new context with which the individual can and will associate it. This might be particularly true if each instance of recall was particularly memorable or significant (possibly being at a trivia night or recalling information needed to answer an important question at work). 

I usually try and avoid making my judgements too based on personal experience but given that the articles both have their good points and flaws I will say that I enjoy letting my mind wander. As Killingsworth et. al. says it is "the brains default mode" (932). It only becomes frustrating trying to accomplish something important or when in a rush. Creativity definitly does seem to come from letting the mind wander but the issues is stopping it when you most want it. However, if we had control over it, would it really be mind wandering? Most studies that "induce" mind wandering acknowledge that it is more of an induction of a task unrelated thought than mind wandering (which is why the Baird study was refreshing). Maybe seeking to control and limit mind wandering, which would clearly be advantageous in certain situation, would actually defeat the purpose of having this mechanism and make all it's advantages impossible. So perhaps we should resign ourselves to Hamlet's wise words "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," and think less about the good or bad of mind wandering.

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References:
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Baird, Benjamin., Smallwood, Jonathan., Mrazek, Michael D., Kam, Julia W. Y., Franklin, Michael, S., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2012). Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation. Psychological Science 23 1117-1122.

Delaney, Peter F., Sahakyan, Lili, Kelley, Colleen M., Zimmerman, Carissa A. (2010). Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming. Psychological Science 21 1036-1042.

Killingsworth, Matthew A., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science Magazine 330 932.

Killingsworth, Matthew A., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2010). Supporting Online Material for A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science Magazine 330.

McVay, Jennifer C., Kane, Michael J. (2012). Why does Working Memory Capacity Predict Variation in Reading Comprehension? Journal of Experimental Psychology 141  302 - 320.