Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, USA.
Conscious Cogn. 2011 Dec;20(4):1604-11. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.007. Epub 2011 Sep 13.
Given that as much as half of human thought arises in a stimulus independent fashion, it would seem unlikely that such thoughts would play no functional role in our lives. However, evidence linking the mind-wandering state to performance decrement has led to the notion that mind-wandering primarily represents a form of cognitive failure. Based on previous work showing a prospective bias to mind-wandering, the current study explores the hypothesis that one potential function of spontaneous thought is to plan and anticipate personally relevant future goals, a process referred to as autobiographical planning. The results confirm that the content of mind-wandering is predominantly future-focused, demonstrate that individuals with high working memory capacity are more likely to engage in prospective mind-wandering, and show that prospective mind-wandering frequently involves autobiographical planning. Together this evidence suggests that mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives.
鉴于多达一半的人类思维是在独立于刺激的情况下产生的，那么这种思维似乎不太可能在我们的生活中没有任何功能作用。然而，将思维漫游状态与表现下降联系起来的证据，导致了这样一种观点，即思维漫游主要代表了一种认知失败的形式。基于先前的研究表明对思维漫游存在前瞻性偏见，本研究探讨了一个假设，即自发思维的一个潜在功能是计划和预测与个人相关的未来目标，这个过程被称为自传体规划。研究结果证实，思维漫游的内容主要是面向未来的，表明具有较高工作记忆能力的个体更有可能进行前瞻性思维漫游，并且表明前瞻性思维漫游经常涉及自传体规划。这些证据表明，思维漫游可以使前瞻性认知操作成为可能，这对个体在日常生活中导航可能是有用的。
