Effect of cognitive load on time spent offline during wakefulness

Humans continuously alternate between online attention to the current environment and offline attention to internally generated thought and imagery. This may be a fundamental feature of the waking brain, but remains poorly understood. Here, we took a data-driven approach to defining online and offline states of wakefulness, using machine learning methods applied to measures of sensory responsiveness, subjective report, electroencephalogram (EEG), and pupil diameter. We tested the effect of cognitive load on the structure and prevalence of online and offline states, hypothesizing that time spent offline would increase as cognitive load of an ongoing task decreased. We also expected that alternation between online and offline states would persist even in the absence of a cognitive task. As in prior studies, we arrived at a three-state model comprised of one online state and two offline states. As predicted, when cognitive load was high, more time was spent online. Also as predicted, the same three states were present even when participants were not performing a task. These observations confirm our method is successful at isolating seconds-long periods of offline time. Varying cognitive load may be a useful way to manipulate time spent in at least one of these offline states in future experimental studies.