The Mechanism Of Mind Wandering And Its Modulation On Creativity

The view of embodied cognition emphasizes the importance of the human body to its cognitive processing,but the relationship between body posture and internal cognitive abilities is still unclear.Mind wandering is a very common self-generated internal cognitive activity,which refers to the transfer of thinking content from ongoing tasks and/or external environmental events to self-generated thoughts and feelings.Summary previous studies,no researchers have directly discussed the influence of body pasture changes on mind-wandering activities,but there are some indirect evidence that executive control and vigilance may play a role in the relationship between posture and mind wandering.Therefore,this study directly investigated the effect of body posture on mind wandering through two experiments and focused on the underlying mechanism of mind wandering.In experiment 1,the subjects were required to complete the reading task under the three static posture conditions of standing,sitting and lying.The randomly inserted probe was used to measure the mind wandering of the subjects(probe-caught method).At the same time,the meta-consciousness level in the mind-wandering state was evaluated through self-report method.The results showed that the frequency of mind wandering increased significantly at lying posture,and the decreased reading performance(accuracy)could indirectly reflect the decrease of executive control level,while there was no significant difference between the three postures in the level of meta-consciousness that related to vigilance.The results of experiment 1 are consistent with the viewpoint of embodied cognition that body state affects cognitive activities.Meanwhile the influence of posture on the frequency of mind wandering is consistent with the prediction of executive control,however,experiment 1 lacked the direct measurement of executive control ability.In experiment 2,executive control was directly measured to investigate the effect of individual executive control on mind wandering.According to the dual mechanism theory of execution control,in experiment 2 the executive control ability is divided into proactive control(goal maintenance),which is measured by the reaction time variability of 5 trials before the probe in the sustained attention response task(SART),and response control(conflict resolution),which is evaluated by the coherence effect in the Flanker task.In addition,experiment 2 also investigated whether the influence of body posture on mind wandering is conducive to the incubation effect.The results showed that in Flanker task,the congruence effect was reduced at the lying posture,suggesting that the indi-vidual's conflict resolution ability was impaired,and the occurrence frequency of mind wandering was increased,while in SART task,the goal maintenance ability and mind-wandering frequency did not change with the body posture.Furthermore,the more mind wandering does not affect the incubation effect,although body posture changes the mind wandering during the incubation period.The conclusion of this study is that the change of body posture may affect the conflict resolution component of executive control,and according to the "executive control failure" assumption,the change of executive ability can better explain the effect of posture on mind wandering that may be the underlining mechanism.