![]() Although there is no currently agreed-upon definition of mind-wandering (Christoff et al., 2018 Christoff, Irving, Fox, Spreng, & Andrews-Hanna, 2016 Irving, 2016 Seli et al., 2018 Seli, Risko, Smilek, & Schacter, 2016), there are a number of dimensions of thought that are being investigated for their presumed connection to mind-wandering. The last decade has seen a remarkable surge into mind-wandering research alongside its educational, clinical, and everyday life implications (Callard, Smallwood, & Margulies, 2012 Marchetti, Koster, Klinger, & Alloy, 2016 Mills, Raffaelli, Irving, Stan, & Christoff, 2017 Valdez, Ramírez, & García, 2014). Class and work schedules that adapt to the diurnal patterns of thought may lead to improved efficiency future work should be done to explore this potential. brain storming, solving novel problems), while leading to performances decrements on tasks that require stability of thought (e.g. These findings may have important implications for education and the workplace, since freely moving thought could facilitate performance on tasks that require flexibility of thought (e.g. Thoughts appear to be most constrained in the morning and peaked in freedom of movement midday, increasing throughout the morning, decreasing throughout the afternoon, and finally increasing again in the evening. The current research provides the first evidence suggesting that the extent of free movement in thought fluctuates reliably throughout our day. While a number of studies have examined mind-wandering rates in everyday life, an implicit assumption has been that the rate is constant over the course of the day. Mind-wandering has been linked to crucial parts of our daily lives, including learning, affect, and job productivity. Future research should focus on probing possible mechanisms behind circadian fluctuations of thought dynamics. Taken together, the present results establish and replicate a complex pattern of change over the course of the day in how freely thought moves, while also providing further evidence that freedom of movement is dissociable from other dimensions of thought such as its task-relatedness and stimulus-dependence. We also demonstrated differences in parameter values for the models representing freely moving thought and two common conceptualizations of mind-wandering: task-unrelated thought and stimulus-independent thought. In the second study, we replicated these effects with a reanalysis of data from a past everyday experience-sampling study. Freely moving thought was found to fluctuate reliably over the course of the day, with lower ratings reported in the early morning and afternoon and higher ratings around midday and evening. These time course data were analyzed using multilevel modelling. In the first study, we employed everyday experience sampling to obtain self-reports from 146 university students who rated the degree of free movement in their thoughts multiple times per day over five days. The existence of diurnal fluctuations in the case of mind-wandering, however, has not been examined to date. Everyday life experience sampling, during which participants respond to “probes” delivered at random intervals throughout the day on their mobile devices, is an effective tool for capturing such diurnal fluctuations in a naturalistic way. ![]() Previous research has demonstrated reliable fluctuations in attentional processes during the course of the day.
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