ArticleScientific reports2021
Simulating thoughts to measure and study internal attention in mental health.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Association between EEG microstate and cognitive function in depressed patients with and without suicidal ideation.BMC psychiatry · 2025Observational
- Invisible Gorillas in the Mind: Internal Inattentional Blindness and the Prospect of Introspection Training.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Decoding and modifying dynamic attentional bias in gaming disorder.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Quality of Life Changes Following the Onset of Cerebellar Ataxia: Symptoms and Concerns Self-reported by Ataxia Patients and Informants.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our mind's eye and the role of internal attention in mental life and suffering has intrigued scholars for centuries. Yet, experimental study of internal attention has been elusive due to our limited capacity to control the timing and content of internal stimuli. We thus developed the Simulated Thoughts Paradigm (STP) to experimentally deliver own-voice thought stimuli that simulate the content and experience of thinking and thereby experimental study of internal attentional processes. In independent experiments (N = 122) integrating STP into established cognitive-experimental tasks, we found and replicated evidence that emotional reactivity to negative thoughts predicts difficulty disengaging internal attention from, as well as biased selective internal attention of, those thoughts; these internal attention processes predict cognitive vulnerability (e.g., negative repetitive thinking) which thereby predict anxiety and depression. Proposed methods and findings may have implications for the study of information processing and attention in mental health broadly and models of internal attentional (dys)control in cognitive vulnerability and mental health more specifically.
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