Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:43:49.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mind wandering as data augmentation: How mental travel supports abstraction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2020

Myrthe Faber Open the ORCID record for Myrthe Faber [Opens in a new window]
Myrthe Faber*
Affiliation:
Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboudumc, Kapittelweg 29, 6525 EN, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. m.faber@donders.ru.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Gilead et al. state that abstraction supports mental travel, and that mental travel critically relies on abstraction. I propose an important addition to this theoretical framework, namely that mental travel might also support abstraction. Specifically, I argue that spontaneous mental travel (mind wandering), much like data augmentation in machine learning, provides variability in mental content and context necessary for abstraction.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 43 , 2020 , e130
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Christoff, K., Irving, Z. C., Fox, K. C. R., Spreng, R. N. & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2016) Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: A dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17(11):718–31. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.113.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Faber, M. & D'Mello, S. K. (2018) How the stimulus influences mind wandering in semantically rich task contexts. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 3(1):35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-018-0129-0.Google ScholarPubMed
Faber, M. & Mills, C. (2018) The critical role of the hippocampus in mind wandering. The Journal of Neuroscience 38(29):6439–41. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0995-18.2018.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kane, M. J., Brown, L. H., McVay, J. C., Silvia, P. J., Myin-Germeys, I. & Kwapil, T. R. (2007) For whom the mind wanders, and when an experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life. Psychological Science 18(7):614–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Killingsworth, M. A. & Gilbert, D. T. (2010) A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science 330(6006):932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McCormick, C., Rosenthal, C. R., Miller, T. D. & Maguire, E. A. (2018) Mind-wandering in people with hippocampal damage. The Journal of Neuroscience 38(11):2745–54. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1812-17.2018.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mills, C., Herrera-Bennett, A., Faber, M. & Christoff, K. (2018) Why the mind wanders: How spontaneous thought's default variability may support episodic efficiency and semantic optimization. In: The Oxford handbook of spontaneous thought: Mind-wandering, creativity, and dreaming, ed. Christoff, K. & Fox, K. C. R., pp. 11–22. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464745.013.42.Google Scholar
Mills, C., Raffaelli, Q., Irving, Z. C., Stan, D. & Christoff, K. (2017) Is an off-task mind a freely-moving mind? Examining the relationship between different dimensions of thought. Consciousness and Cognition 58:20–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.10.003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M. (2003) The role of similarity in the development of categorization. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(6):246–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00109-8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marr, D. (1971) Simple memory: A theory for archicortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 262:23–81.Google ScholarPubMed