Language facilitates introspection: Verbal mind-wandering has privileged access to consciousness.
Introspection and language are the cognitive prides of humankind, but their interactions in healthy cognition remain unclear. Episodes of mind-wandering, where personal thoughts often go unnoticed for some time before being introspected, offer a unique opportunity to study the role of language in introspection. In this paper, we show that inner speech facilitates awareness of mind-wandering. In two experiments, we either interfered with verbal working memory, via articulatory suppression (Exp. 1), or entrained it, via presentation of verbal material (Exp. 2), and measured the resulting awareness of mind-wandering. Articulatory suppression decreased the likelihood to spontaneously notice mind-wandering, whereas verbal material increased retrospective awareness of mind-wandering. In addition, an ecological study using smartphones confirmed that inner speech vividness positively predicted mind-wandering awareness (Exp. 3). Together, these findings support the view that inner speech facilitates introspection of one's thoughts, and therefore provides empirical evidence for a positive relation between language and consciousness.
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives de l'École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 75005 Paris, France; EA 2114, Psychologie des Ages de la vie, Francois Rabelais University, Tours, France. Electronic address: bastian.mikael@gmail.com.
Mikaël
M
Bastian
Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstraße 191, D-10117 Berlin, Germany; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. Electronic address: sebastien.lerique@normalesup.org.
Sébastien
S
Lerique
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, UK. Electronic address: vincenta@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk.
Vincent
V
Adam
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, United States. Electronic address: michael.franklin@psych.ucsb.edu.
Michael S
MS
Franklin
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, United States. Electronic address: jonathan.schooler@psych.ucsb.edu.
Jonathan W
JW
Schooler
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives de l'École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 75005 Paris, France; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. Electronic address: jerome.sackur@gmail.com.
Jérôme
J
Sackur
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
Attention; Consciousness; Inner speech; Meta-awareness; Mind-wandering; Verbal working memory