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Updated: Nov 11, 2025

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Published on: July 5, 2015
Spontaneous state alternations in the time course of mind wandering
Meera Zukosky1, Ranxiao Frances Wang1
1University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America.
Abstract:
It's a common assumption that people's mental state timeline can be divided into a sequence of focus-mind wandering episodes, each comprises a focusing stage followed by a mind wandering stage. Accordingly, probability of being in a focus state should be high early in an episode and decrease overtime. We investigated the dynamics of shifting between meditation and off task thoughts by systematically probing participants at various time points during a focus-mind wandering episode. Contrary to predictions of the two-stage model, there's no significant decrease in probability of focus state during a focus-mind wandering episode. Simulations matching parameters of each participant suggest that the lack of this negative trend was not due to statistical power. Instead, people may have multiple spontaneous alternations between meditation and off task thoughts before they are able to catch themselves mind wandering. Based on this Multiple Sub-event Model, a novel method was developed to estimate the number of sub-events during a focus-mind wandering episode.
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