Dear Users

This afternoon (from 4 pm in B020), there will be two internal project proposal presentations from Jonny Smallwood's group: *

1) Differences between the Default Mode Network's activity during self-relevant and not-self-relevant memory formation *

Irene de Caso

*2) Window to the wandering mind - an fMRI investigation on the role of pupil dilation in the occurrence of self-generated thought*

Mahiko Konishi

Abstract

Occurrences of mind-wandering, i.e. shifting our attention from the external environment to our self-generated thoughts, are spontaneous, dynamic experiences that clearly illustrate the fleeting identity of consciousness. Due to its subjective nature, first-person point of view measures like self-reports and experience sampling, such as stopping a participant in the middle of a task and asking him if he was focused on the task or distracted, have long been the state of the art for the study of self-generated thought. These methods, while managing to capture instances of this experience, lack of a way to objectively gauge occurrences of self-generated thought from a second- or third-person point of view without disrupting the experience itself. As there is previous evidence that pupil dilation tracks fluctuations in mind wandering and that these are also linked at a neural level with the activation of the Default Mode Network, we aim to bring the two methods together in order to triangulate (with the help of experience sampling) the temporal dynamics of self-generated thought.

Everyone is welcome to attend and refreshments will be available after the seminar.

Best wishes Rebecca