title: Self-reflection and the temporal focus of the wandering mind.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. jonsmallwood2004@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Smallwood
authors.forename: Jonathan W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Schooler
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Turk
authors.forename: Sheila J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Cunningham
authors.forename: Phebe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Burns
authors.forename: C Neil
authors.initials: CN
authors.lastname: Macrae
mesh_terms: D003243:Consciousness; D005201:Fantasy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D012649:Self Concept; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult