ArticleScientific reports2017
Transcranial direct current stimulation of the medial prefrontal cortex dampens mind-wandering in men.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Interaction of the Dorsolateral and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex During Mind Wandering.Brain topography · 2023Trial
- Reading proficiency influences the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation: Evidence from selective modulation of dorsal and ventral pathways of reading in bilinguals.Brain and language · 2020Trial
- No evidence for the impact of mind wandering on recognition associative task: an on-line preregistered study.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Sex Does Matter! The Influence of Sex on Outcomes of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS).Cells · 2026Review
- Reduced mind-wandering and fewer depressive symptoms associated with damage to the medial prefrontal cortex and default mode network.Neuropsychologia · 2025Article
- Mind Wandering during Implicit Learning Is Associated with Increased Periodic EEG Activity and Improved Extraction of Hidden Probabilistic Patterns.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cutaneous sensory symptoms and emotional regulation in non-clinical healthy students: a near-infrared spectroscopy study.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Taking time to compose thoughts with prefrontal schemata.Experimental brain research · 2024Article
- Recent advances in the neuroscience of spontaneous and off-task thought: implications for mental health.Nature. Mental health · 2023Article
- Vigilance decrement and mind-wandering in sustained attention tasks: Two sides of the same coin?Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Prefrontal tDCS is unable to modulate mind wandering propensity or underlying functional or effective brain connectivity.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Contrasting Mind-Wandering, (Dark) Flow, and Affect During Multiline and Single-Line Slot Machine Play.Journal of gambling studies · 2022Article
- Mind-Wandering in Adolescents Predicts Worse Affect and Is Linked to Aberrant Default Mode Network-Salience Network Connectivity.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2021Article
- Lesion network mapping demonstrates that mind-wandering is associated with the default mode network.Journal of neuroscience research · 2021Article
- Using deliberate mind-wandering to escape negative mood states: Implications for gambling to escape.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2020Article
- Transcranial direct current stimulation of default mode network parietal nodes decreases negative mind-wandering about the past.Cognitive therapy and research · 2020Article
- Medial prefrontal cortex involvement in aesthetic appreciation of paintings: a tDCS study.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Effect of tDCS Over the Right Inferior Parietal Lobule on Mind-Wandering Propensity.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Article
- Brain Activity Associated With Expected Task Difficulty.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Article
- A Mind Free to Wander: Neural and Computational Constraints on Spontaneous Thought.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mind-wandering, the mind's capacity to stray from external events and generate task-unrelated thought, has been associated with activity in the brain default network. To date, little is understood about the contribution of individual nodes of this network to mind-wandering. Here, we investigated the role of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in mind-wandering, by perturbing this region with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Young healthy participants performed a choice reaction time task both before and after receiving cathodal tDCS over mPFC, and had their thoughts periodically sampled. We found that tDCS over mPFC - but not occipital or sham tDCS - decreased the propensity to mind-wander. The tDCS-induced reduction in mind-wandering occurred in men, but not in women, and was accompanied by a change in the content of task-unrelated though, which became more related to other people (as opposed to the self) following tDCS. These findings indicate that mPFC is crucial for mind-wandering, possibly by helping construction of self-relevant scenarios capable to divert attention inward, away from perceptual reality. Gender-related differences in tDCS-induced changes suggest that mPFC controls mind-wandering differently in men and women, which may depend on differences in the structural and functional organization of distributed brain networks governing mind-wandering, including mPFC.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.