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Age-related changes in the temporal focus and self-referential content of spontaneous cognition during periods of low cognitive demand

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Abstract

An intriguing aspect of human cognition is the unique capacity to mentally retreat from our immediate surroundings to consider perspectives distinct from the here and now. Despite increasing interest in this phenomenon, relatively little is known regarding age-related changes in off-task, self-generated thought (often referred to as “mind-wandering”), particularly under conditions of low cognitive demand. While a number of studies have investigated the temporal orientation of mind-wandering with increasing age, findings have been largely inconsistent. Here, we explored the frequency, temporal focus, and self-referential/social content of spontaneous task-unrelated, perceptually decoupled thought in 30 young and 33 healthy older adults using the Shape Expectations task, a validated experimental paradigm in which discrete facets of inner mentation are quantified along a conceptual continuum using open-ended report. Participants also completed the daydreaming subscale of the Imaginal Process Inventory (IPI) as a trait measure of mind-wandering propensity. Significant group differences emerged on the Shape Expectations task, with reduced instances of mind-wandering in the context of elevated task-related thoughts relative to younger adults. In terms of temporal focus, a preponderance of present/atemporal off-task thoughts was evident irrespective of group; however, significantly higher levels of future-oriented thoughts were provided by younger adults, contrasting with significantly higher instances of retrospection in the older group. In addition, older adults displayed significantly fewer incidences of self-referential cognition relative to their younger counterparts. Our findings indicate a distinct attenuation of off-task, self-generated thought processes with increasing age, with evidence for a shift in temporal focus and self-referential quality, during periods of low cognitive demand.

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Notes

  1. For consistency with the special issue’s theme on spontaneous future thinking, we use the phrase “spontaneous cognition” to refer to self-generated (i.e., “internal” or “stimulus-independent” thoughts) that are also unrelated to the experimental task. As elaborated in the discussion, we note that several additional operational definitions of spontaneous cognition have been used in literature. Similarly, when referring to our data summarised here, we adopt the same operational definition for the phrase “mind-wandering” while noting ongoing debates in the literature (see discussion).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the participants for their continued support of our research.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders Memory Node (CE11000102). MI is supported by an ARC Future Fellowship (FT160100096). CO’C is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Neil Hamilton Fairley Fellowship (GNT1091310) and the Wellcome Trust (200181/Z/15/Z). These funding sources had no involvement in the study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, writing the manuscript, and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

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Correspondence to Muireann Irish.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Research involving human participants and/or animals

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and local area research ethics committees and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to the potential for individual privacy to be compromised but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Irish, M., Goldberg, Zl., Alaeddin, S. et al. Age-related changes in the temporal focus and self-referential content of spontaneous cognition during periods of low cognitive demand. Psychological Research 83, 747–760 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1102-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1102-8

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