From One Thought to the Next: Evidence for an Accumulation-to-Threshold Mechanism in Spontaneous Thinking
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The dynamics of the stream of spontaneous thoughts has been the object of increasing research inthe last few years. In the present study, we set out to study the transitions from one coherentthought episode to the next. Participants (N=61) were asked to either perform spontaneous wordproduction or to let their mind wander during runs of 2 to 3 minutes. They were instructed toreport thought transitions with a key press (online segmentation). First, we validate the use of thisonline segmentation as a report of thought transitions, enabling us to measure the duration ofcoherent thought episodes. Then, we show that among a reasonable set of candidate mechanisms,the timing of thought transitions is best explained by an accumulation-to-threshold model. Wefurther find that the threshold of this accumulation – but not the drift rate – negatively correlateswith participants’ trait tendency for mind-wandering. Our results shed new light on the processesunderpinning the individual variability of mind-wandering.
