Yang Hang, Paller Ken A, van Vugt Marieke
Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Aug 11;16:892863. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.892863. eCollection 2022.
For a large proportion of our daily lives, spontaneously occurring thoughts tend to disengage our minds from goal-directed thinking. Previous studies showed that EEG features such as the P3 and alpha oscillations can predict mind-wandering to some extent, but only with accuracies of around 60%. A potential candidate for improving prediction accuracy is the Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP), which is used frequently in single-trial contexts such as brain-computer interfaces as a marker of the direction of attention. In this study, we modified the sustained attention to response task (SART) that is usually employed to measure spontaneous thought to incorporate the SSVEP elicited by a 12.5-Hz flicker. We then examined whether the SSVEP could track and allow for the prediction of the stickiness and task-relatedness dimensions of spontaneous thought. Our results show that the SSVEP evoked by flickering words was able to distinguish between more and less sticky thinking but not between whether a participant was on- or off-task. This suggests that the SSVEP is able to track spontaneous thinking when it is strongly disengaged from the task (as in the sticky form of off-task thinking) but not off-task thought in general. Future research should determine the exact dimensions of spontaneous thought to which the SSVEP is most sensitive.
在我们日常生活的很大一部分时间里，自发产生的想法往往会使我们的思维从目标导向的思考中脱离出来。先前的研究表明，诸如P3和阿尔法振荡等脑电图特征在一定程度上可以预测走神，但准确率仅约为60%。提高预测准确率的一个潜在候选因素是稳态视觉诱发电位（SSVEP），它在诸如脑机接口等单次试验情境中经常被用作注意力方向的标记。在本研究中，我们修改了通常用于测量自发思维的持续注意力对反应任务（SART），以纳入由12.5赫兹闪烁诱发的SSVEP。然后，我们研究了SSVEP是否能够追踪并预测自发思维的粘性和与任务相关性维度。我们的结果表明，由闪烁文字诱发的SSVEP能够区分粘性较强和较弱的思维，但无法区分参与者是否在执行任务。这表明，当自发思维与任务强烈脱离时（如在非任务思维的粘性形式中），SSVEP能够追踪自发思维，但一般无法追踪非任务思维。未来的研究应该确定SSVEP最敏感的自发思维的确切维度。
