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.

The Back and Forth of Mind Wandering

This weeks readings are an exciting opportunity to take a more in depth look at many of  theories proposed regarding attention and mind wandering over the last few weeks as well as the methodology used by the experimenters in past studies. Additionally the fact that this weeks readings directly respond to each other allow for an excellent opportunity to test and challenge the limits the theories proposed by each.

The main article of the week "The Restless Mind," is a review of several studies - some of which have already been discussed in this blog. Researchers Smallwood and Shooler aim to "frame [previous] literature on mind wandering in a ontet that will enable it's integration into mainstreem models of executive attention. By specifically exploring what role  executive attention can be said to play in studies conducted over the last 30 years on mind wandering, Smallwood and Schooler bring light to some of the more complex or unclear results and elements of past research.

The main thrust of the article is that "mind wandering is a situation in which executive control shifts away from a primary task to the processing of a personal goal" (Smallwood, Schooler 2006). They state that executive control does not directly shit attention away from one task to another but rather that a stimulus related to the primary task draws the individual's attention to another goal and their executive control then engages with that task, unaware of the fact that it has shifted. The main support for this theory lies in the studies run by experimenters like Giambra, Antrobus, and Schooler himself. These men and their teams have run studies that indicate that mind wandering is significantly less likely to occur when the individual is involved in a task that has high demands on controlled processing. Additionally if mind wandering is already occuring the individual will perform poorly (with a lot of errors) on a really demanding task.  Similarly multiple goes at a task and practice may lead to habituation which allows for more mind wandering since cognitive processes are not being engaged.

In order for Smallwood and Schooler's theory to work a few assumptions must be made:

• Individuals have a hierarchy of goals (i.e. they can have multiply personally relevent goals) 
• Some fo these goals can be triggered automatically by salient stimuli 
• conscious and meta-awareness are distinct (i.e the individual have active goals- this involves consciousness  however they are not always aware of the fact that they have begun processing and problem solving for that issue). 

An additional interesting distinction that Smallwood and Schooler make is that mind wandering needs memory retrieval. The individual must be accessing their memory system. Smallwood and School claim there is evidence that mind wandering is associated with a shift of information retrieval by use of familiarity instead of recall. That is something more familiar will manifest itself when mind wandering rather than something that the individual must really think about to remember.

McVay and Kane's 2010 article published in the same journal directly responds to Smallwood and Schooler. In, "Does Mind Wandering Reflect Executive Function or Executive Failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008)" McVay and Kane reiterate some of the Smallwood Schooler claims as well as those by Watkins et. al. published in 2008. They are critical of the theories proposed and instead propose that "mind wandering reflects a failure of the executive control-system to adequately combat interfearing thoughts that are generated and maintained automatically" (McVay, Kane, 189).

This difference in theory is actually quite significant. The implications are (perhaps) that (under this theory) mind wandering can we lessened through training and design of the activity. The McVay theory places the cause of mind wandering as a failure of the individuals executive processing to focus. Schooler and Smallwood were much more likely to attribute the cause of the mind wandering to be situational. They acknowledge he fact that Smallwood and Schiller's theory is not necessarily the most parsimonious. A few of the elements (dichotomy between consciousness and meta-awareness and hierarchy of goals) require a lot of explaining and qualification to work.

Smallwood quickly responded to the McVay in an article, "Why the Global Availability of Mind Wandering Necessitates Resource Competition: Reply to McVay and Kane",  a few months later. He rejects the control failure hypothesis possibility (proposed by McVay et. al.). Instead he defends the conception that attention and focus make demands on resources. This is clear to him because of the global availability (control failure is always reportable).

This back and forth does an excellent job of really flushing out the theories and using various common studies to back them up (ex: Stroop test). However, despite all the evaluation and theorizing there are a few crucial aspects of the study of mind wandering that I feel have not reached a satisfactory consensus or conclusion.

Self-caught mind wandering - or self - reports are indeed useful. There are circumstances in which an experimenter might really be interested in what the participant has to say about mind wandering. Nevertheless I am not convinced that asking participants to stop themselves and report on instances of mind wandering does not affect the total number of occurrences. It seems to me that this level of self awareness adds more the the participants cognitive load. They are working on a task and at the same time activly trying to understand their behavior.  Smallwood and Schooler say that "it is unclear whether the self monitoring approach indexes changes the results from engaging in mind wandering or changes that result from catching oneself mind wandering," and "although attending to mind wandering may alter our experience, there has been little empirical support for this premis (Smallwood et. al, 948). However if this is really the case it might be evidence that there is something more complicated going on with working memory and cognitive load, because being tasked with awareness of mind wandering is indeed an additional task that the participant is doing that the other group is not.


Sources: 


McVay, Jennifer C., Kane, Michael J. (2010). Does Mind Wandering Reflect Executive Function or Executive Failure? Comment on Smallwood and 
Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). Psychological Bulletin, 135, 188-197. 

Smallwood, Jonathan. (2010). Why the Global Availability of Mind Wandering Necessitates Resource Competition: Reply to McVay and Kane. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 202-207.  

Smallwood, Jonathan., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2006). The Restless Mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 946-958. 

To Wander Or Not To Wander

This weeks readings mark a notable shift from a discussion on sustained attention and begin to delve more into the subject of mind wantering. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as Task-unrelated images or thoughts (TUITs) or Stimulus Independent Thoughts (SITs). The take away of from this set of reading is that creating the tools and methodology to study the wandering mind is incredibly difficult. While each study poses insightful questions on the subject, the majority come across as overly ambitious. They leave the reader questioning design choices, validity of conclusions and how much progress has actually been made in this domain. 

Leonard M. Giambra's study, "A Laboratory Method for Investigating Influences on Switching Attention to Task-Unrelated Imagery and Thought," published in 1995 attempts to make  a very complete examination of TUITs. However, the more closely the experiments are studied the more it seems that the research is overly ambitious and somewhat removed from the conclusions of previous research. The main theory of the study iss that "when information from the external world does not demand processing or does not use all available cognitive capacity, then excess capacity can be devoted to processing information of an internal origin" (Giambra, 1). This is to say that attention and focus make certain demands on human processing. When this demand is weak and processing systems are not being fully used, the mind will attend to thoughts unrelated to the current task. Giambra further suggests that TUITs belong to two discrete categories. Uncontrolled shifts occur when a TUIT simply grabs our attention. Controlled shifts occur when we deliberately shift our attention to the TUIT. 

In this article Giambra is primarily concerned with fining the best possible method of having participants report TUITs in experimental conditions. He proposes his probe-TUIT measurement method which prompts the participant at periods ranging between 15- 30 seconds about whether or not they are experiencing TUITs. This method is believed and "proved" to be ideal over the course of his experiments because it  maintains consistent individual differences over different taks conditions and is very sensitive to the conditions of a concurrent task (Giambra, 4). While this may all be true, the consequences of having a participant self-report their mind wandering left me with some doubts. Thought he states that subjects didn't report more TUITs because they were being asked to be attnetiove to them, the consequences and interference involved in self reporting seems inevitable. He states that there was one occasion in which a participant explicitly stated that they had trouble actually responding to task stimuli, because they were distracted by self reporting TUITs. If this is the case for one individual it is highly likely that others have experienced this difficulty. Aside from messing with the validity of the results this possible confound has other consequences. The act of self reflection on TUIT instances while participating in a vigilance task is cognitively demanding. It is possible that the addition to the demand on the individuals central executive system. This system is extensively discussed in an article written by Teasdale et. al.

A series of experiments conducted by John Teasdale et. al. proposed an interesting perspective on SITs. In "Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources,"the experimenters discuss stimulus-independent thoughts as a very natural phenomenon. Rather than viewing it as something that must be stopped they see the task that a participant is being asked to compete must prove itself more interesting and engaging than the default SIT alternative. Teasdale focuses on the Braddeley-Hitch approach to SITs by using resource interference methodology. Specifically, the experimenters believe that "the extent to which tasks [are] related to specific resources of working memory interfer[s] with spontaneous STI production reflect[s] the involvement of those resources in thought production" (Teasdale et. al., 552). Teasdale uses Braddeley and Hitch's list of three main working memory components to construct the experiments in this paper.  

The first few experiments conducted attempt to evaluate the influence that the visiospatial  and the phonological systems have on STI's. However this was difficult to demonstrate because the extent to which those systems could be isolated from the Central Executive was not clear. Even so, when testing the Central Executive specifically Teasdale found that "production of STI's depends on central executive resources" (Teasdale 558). One of the main questions that this work raises for me involves last weeks discussion of bidirectionality. This theory states that it is possible for an individual to lessen their attention to a stimulus in order to actively try and problem solve their work with that given stimulus in a task. Such a choice seems as thought it would involve a lot of use of the central executive system. In these instances the issues doesn't seem to be that the participant's central executive system is being arbitrarily being overwhelmed by something else, but rather that it is a conscious choice to divert attention elsewhere. 

Teasdale was not the first to propose that there is a certain demand which will dreaile and individual from the task at hand. In "Study in the Stream of Consciousness: experimental Enhancement and Suppression of Spontaneous Cognitive Processes," Antrobus et. al. propose that the human cognitive system has a an "upper limit" for it's operation which is the sum of all the information it is perceiving from internal sources as well as external sources (Antrobus, 400). Specifically these two channels are: 

  1) External Enviornment          2) Inner Dimension
                                                       - short term memory 
                                                       - elaborations of recently perceived events
                                                       - events in long term memory storage.  

Unlike the vagueness of the previous study, Antrobus' paper proposes that the individual has some say, though usually subconsciously, about what information it processes more of. When the payoff for an internal source outweighs an external or vice versa, it is that channel which the cognitive system will favor. While this study had some potential issues involving unintentionally priming participants it provokes some interesting theories on the way mind wandering functions and how, if at all, individuals are aware of  it. 

The final article of the week makes some exciting attempts to trace participant mind wandering in a way that may lead to little self evaluation in the future. "Eye Movements During Mindless Reading", published by Reichle et. al. uses eye movements as a way to measure mindless reading in seven participants. The experimenters successfully proved that "fixations during mindless reading should be qualitatively different than fixations associated with normal reading" (Reichle, 1301). 

What is exciting about these results is not necessarily the manner in which they detected mind wandering in their participants but rather that the eye tracking managed to detect mindless reading (using predetermined cues such as eye fixation) incredibly accurately. This study seemed to be the most promising in term so future application and focused experimental approach.  Unfortunately the fact that it had only 4 participants leads to a questions regarding external validity. Nevertheless the switch from participant self reporting and electronic detection of TUIT or SIT states would be a large step forward in the possibilites of this research. 


Resources:


Antrobus, John., Singer, Jerome., Greenberg, Stanley. (1966). "Study in the Stream of Consciousness: experimental Enhancement and Suppression of Spontaneous Cognitive Processes." Perceptual and Motor Skills, 23, 399-417. 


Giambra, L. (1995). "A Laboratory Method for Investigating Influences on Switching Attention to Task-Unrelated Imagery and Thought." Consciousness and Cognition 4, 1-21. 

Teasdale, John D., Dritschel, Barbara H., Taylor, Melanie J. (1995). "Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources." Memory and Cognition 23(5) 551-559.

Reichle, Erik D., Reinberg, Andrew E., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2010). "Eye Movements During Mindless Reading." Psychological Science, 21, 1300-1310. 

What Happens When There are 3 States, a Habituation Issue and Mindedness Theory

This week there was a larger than usual amount of direct debate about the topic of vigilance decrement  The experimenters attempted to classify vigilance decrements according to the manner in which it affectes the individual, possible causes of the decrement and even ways the decrement can be avoided. However, as soon as these distinctions are made it becomes clear that there is a lot of potential conflict and disagreement. The main conflict is between thinking of a vigilance decrement as a Global Habituation Issues or as a Mindedness Issues. These two theories set a tone for the type of solution or possible help one might be able to extend an individual experiencing a vigilance decrement. At the same time it is possible that there is more to be gained by examining vigilance as a sequential set of "states." 

Researchers, Allan Cheyne, Grayden Solman, Jonathan Carriere,  and Daniel Smilek, published an article in 2009 entitled "Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors." Both the title and the content of this article are very clear. The team of psychologists worked to create what they call a "three state attentional model of engagement/disengagement" (Cheyne et. al., 98). This is essentially a mode of classifying vigilance decrements. These researchers believe there is a trend among type of decrement. This is not a reference to the cause of the decrement per se but rather a comment on the quality of the weighing attention.

The three stages they propose are illustrated in the chart below. 

Cheyne et. al. are very clear that these there stages are discrete. One is one of the 3 stages never somewhere in between. Yet, there are two features of these theoretical stages that are particularly intriguing  First, experimental research as indicated that a person who falls into one of the states is much more biased to fall into or to have been in one of the others. This points us to the second interesting feature. Much in the same way light is both a particle and a wave, these stages are both discrete and lie on a continuum. A person completing a task will go through the stages in order starting with the first and -possibly - making it to the last. The shift may be quick but it must exist. The hypothesis that the three states are sequentially related is known as "Temporal Relations and Transitions Between States" (Cheyne, 103). 

The experimenters had three measures associated with each of the measures (included in the third column of the chart above. Each calculable measure is in a sense a proxy for the  experimenters expectation and theories regarding it's respective state.

A final interesting and particularly noteworthy point that these researchers made is the "Bidrectionality" of the wandering mind. This theory simply states that it is possible for a wandering mind to still be attending to a task that is being worked on. Even if the individual completely a task is not attending to the item or specific action which they are performing, it is possible that they are simply problem solving or perhaps even thinking ahead. A wandering mind is therefore not always a problem. It becomes problamatic when the item or issue being attended to is incredibly important. In  these cases a wandering mind, even in the interest of the task, may be incredible unhelpful (like driving a car while trying to figure out which exit is best for you to get off at. 

This issue struck me as particularly novel and facinating in terms of my previous study in the subject. The question of what the participants attention has been slipping towards has just not been a matter of question so far. Perhaps not everything that we've seen has been a vigilance decrement but more specifically problem solving with the intention of being vigilant? 

Atsunori Ariga, and Alejandro Lleras' article "Brief and rare mental ‘‘breaks’’ keep you focused: Deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements" and William Helton and Paul Russell's article "Brief mental breaks and content-free cues may not keep you focused" literally respond to the same issues. Both sets of researchers are trying to identify possible solutions to the vigilance decrememtn we are at this point sure exists and occurs consistently. The main issues that Helton et. al. have with Ariga et. al.  is that they believe there is a major confound in the experiment; mental load. 

In short, Ariga looks at vigilance decrement as a failure of the Cognitive control system NOT a brain resource replenishing issues. the cognitive control system must struggles to  keep the target looked for in the vigilance task active for extended periods of times. This is essentially known as the Global Habituation Theory. To test this theory Ariga et. al. had 4 group complete a task of detecting a short line when the general event was a longer line.

1) The control simply performed the vigilance task. 

2) The no switch condition memorized 4 numbers  at the onset of the experiment performed the vigilance task and was then asked to identify the memorize numbers once the vigilance task was completed. 

3) The switch condition memorized the 4 numbers, began the vigilance task, and was probed through out the vigilance task about the numbers memorized.  

4) The Digit Ignored group saw the same task as group 3, but memorized no numbers and was told to ignore the probing number signals that reoccured throughout the task.

The results indicated that having another task (ex: the switch condition) was much more beneficial for avoiding vigilance decrement than an of the other possibilities. Things soon become very complicated as Helton et. al. begin to unravel Ariga et. al.'s arguments. Helton reexplains the two theories (mindedness and global habituation) in his paper but he also explains them in terms of mental load; "under-load and overload" respectively (Helton et. al., 38). He believes that there is no way to resolve metal overload other than reducing the load. His problem with Ariga's article was that the statistics run. After tearing those apart he notes that Arigas's Switch condition adds an additional task and really increases the mental load of the participant. So rather than reduce vigilance decrement it in fact increases it.

Though both articles make valid points it is difficult to really weigh the results if one it to truse the statistical analysis that Helton has dont on the Ariga article. At the same time it seems that both researchers could take a page out of Cheyne's book and consider that the decrement that their participants are experiencing is not unnecessary. That perhaps mental load is not the cause of vigilance decrement but one of the results. Yes, there is the obvious chang ein mental load with a task that requires more memory storage and other similar factors, but if an individual allocates memory, space, and time to try and analyze their own decrements, like in a Stage 1 or Stage 2, they are increasing their own mental load. Perhaps it is impossible to really monitor when and if this occurs. Furthermore, the consequences of claiming that only reducing memory load is a valid solution to memory load induced vigilance decrements is to say that there is an entire field of people who's work cannot be made easier since decreasing memory load is not always, if ever, a real- life solution to a problem with a wandering mind.  

References: 

Ariga, Atsunori., Lleras, Alejandro. "Brief and rare mental 'breaks' keep you focused: Deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements". (2011). Cognition. 118: 439-443. 

Cheyne, J. Allan., Solman, Grayden J.F.,  Carriere, Jonathan S.A., Smilek, Daniel. "Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors." (2009). Cognition. 111: 98-113. 

Helton, William S., Russell,  Paul N. "Brief mental breaks and content-free cues may not keep you focused." Brain Research. (2012). 219: 37-46. 

Sometimes A "Boring" Task Is Just Too Hard

One of the aspects of vigilance and attention that I became most curious about after last week's readings was the extent to which an individuals physical ability to attend to a stimulus played a role in their decline of accurate stimulus responses. This is to say that there may be a physiological change that influences vigilance.

This weeks readings, to some extent, addressed that very issue.

In his article "Memory Load and Event Rate Control Sensitivity", Dr. Raja Parasuraman notes that individuals' ability to accurately detect targets is accompanied by a lowering in their false detection rates. This means they miss the target they are supposed to be attending to (have more misses) but also make fewer false ID's (have fewer fasle positives). Parasuraman believes this is due to one of two factors, "a deterioration in the observer's ability to discriminate targets from non targets or to a response process in which the observer becomes more cautious about reporting a target with time" (Parasuraman, 1979). The former is a perceptual sensitivity issues while the latter is an issue relating to an individuals' response criteria.
Parasuraman also identifies two aspects of an activity that can influence an individuals' perceptual sensitivity:

1) The manner in which the discrimination task is presented to the participant

If the activity involves the participant identifying a target that is presented at the same time as the baseline event (simultaneous discrimination task) he or she will be more successful.





If the activity relies on using memory to identify and report a stimulus a (known as a successive discrimination task) a participant will have a harder time identifying that stimulus as the target that he or she is looking for.

2) The rate at which the events in the discrimination task occur. 
The higher the even rate the bigger the individuals decline in vigilance.

Dr. Parasuraman compares the results of his own experiment (which sustain his hypotheses) with the results of 27 other studies involving vigilance. His meta analysis (which again support his hypotheses) breaks the findings down into the chart below (from Parasuarman, 1979) which distinguishes between successive and simultaneous discrimination, the event rates, whether a sensitivity decrement was present and a few other factors.

Paraduarman's results were very influential in the study of vigilance and have since led to many new theories on vigilance.  Psychologists Judi See, Stephen Howe, Joel Warm, and William Dember, published an article in 1995 entitles "Meta-Analysis of the Sensitivity Decrement in Vigilance" examining some of the most influential studies done to date. 

The primary offering of this article is the notion of sensory vigilance and cognitive vigilance. See et. al. noticed that in most previous studies there was no distinction made between tasks that required sensory attention from participants and those that asked for cognitive vigilance. They realized that this seemingly small distinction is actually rather significant and a "crucial element in the occurrence of sensitivity decrements in vigilance" (See et. al. 1995). Interestingly they concluded that individuas are fundamentally more familiar with cognitive stimuli and can therefore make better judgements concerning things they are so familiar with. While this proposition is interesting I found myself confused by whether or not I properly understood what it meant. Thought it may be uncommon to have a sensory stimulus that one is as confident  and familiar with as a cognitive one, I do not believe it is impossible. Wouldn't an expert piano tuner be as comfortable making a call regarding an auditory stimulus as he would on say some cognitive task. Isn't there a point of expertise at which there is perhaps no distinction between these two things? And if so how is it possible that there is a sensitivity detriment in sensory tasks but not in cognitive ones?

The final article for the week "Vigilance Requires Hard Mental Work and Is Stressful" made very interesting claims about the nature of vigilance. Though people often say that a vigilance task is perhaps boring or unexciting or uneventful, evidence show that it is actually quite demanding.

This coclusion was obtained through the use of the NASA-TLX  scale (image to the left). It measures participant feedback on workload on 7 scales, "Mental Demand," "Physical Demand," "Temporal Demand," "performance," "Effort," and "Frustration." 

The other particularly interesting element of the study was the face that it concluded that the danger with human vigilance is that humans are actually not envolved enough in the vigilance tasks they are required to perform. Though the study remakes that "accidents ranging in scale from major to minor are often the result of vigilance failures on the part of human operators in semiautomated systems," the problem actually lies in the fact that machinery lessens the amount of attention that an indiviual feels he or shee needs to apply to the task at hand (Warm et. al. 2008).
Though this all seems logical it is, to some extent at odds with the previously stated fact that human beings actually find extended periods of vigilance stressful and anxiety causing.

After reading these articles I am also curious about the type of vigilance taks that these studies examine. Thought it is clear that there are restrictions on the types of experiments that can be run in a controlled and efficient manner, not all things that human beings attend to are necessarily boring. All these experiments test mandatory vigilance tasks. Even if not 100% mandatory and the participant can choose to terminate the task, it is not an activity that one would ever engage in for pleasure. Is there a difference in the way vigilance declines, if there is a decline at all, when an individual is attending to something of interest to them. A soccer referee looking for infractions or rule violations and a ballett teacher correcting her students as they do routine barre work and correcting their misalignments and erros are two such examples. In these cases, working on something that one might find pleasurable might automatically increase adrenaline levels, make the task more pleasant, and simultaneously decrease feelings of anxiety.




References:

Parasuraman, R. (1979). "Memory load and event rate control sensitivity

decrements in sustained attention." Science, 205, 924–927.

See, J. E., Howe, S. R., Warm, J. S., & Dember, W. N. (1995). "Meta-analysis of the       sensitivity decrement in vigilance." Psycho- logical Bulletin, 117, 230–249.

Warm, JS., Parasuraman R.,Matthews G. (2008). "Vigilance requires hard mental work and is stressful." Hum Factors, 50, 433-41.