Citation

Smallwood J, Schooler JW, Turk DJ, Cunningham SJ, Burns P, Macrae CN. Conscious. Cogn. 2011; 20(4): 1120-1126.

Affiliation

Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. jonsmallwood2004@yahoo.com

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.concog.2010.12.017

PMID

21277803

Abstract

Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants' engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength of self-referential thought - as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items - was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future.

Language: en