ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2022
Catching wandering minds with tapping fingers: neural and behavioral insights into task-unrelated cognition.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Relative Accuracy of Different Methods for Measuring Mind Wandering Subtypes: A Systematic Review.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Noradrenergic activity as a key target in modulating consciousness.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Human movement patterns predict task-unrelated thought.PloS one · 2026Article
- Brain signal complexity tracks mind-wandering and visual perceptual learning.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Distinct timescales dissociate spontaneous thought dimensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A novel method for modeling tonic and phasic pupil dynamics in humans.Behavior research methods · 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
- Mind wandering enhances statistical learning.iScience · 2025Article
- When the mind's eye prevails: The Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Echoes from Intrinsic Connectivity Networks in the Subcortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Catching wandering minds with tapping fingers: neural and behavioral insights into task-unrelated cognition.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- The effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on the interplay between executive control, behavioral variability and mind wandering: A registered report.Neuroimage. Reports · 2022Article
- Catching Mind Wandering With Pupillometry: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When the human mind wanders, it engages in episodes during which attention is focused on self-generated thoughts rather than on external task demands. Although the sustained attention to response task is commonly used to examine relationships between mind wandering and executive functions, limited executive resources are required for optimal task performance. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between mind wandering and executive functions more closely by employing a recently developed finger-tapping task to monitor fluctuations in attention and executive control through task performance and periodical experience sampling during concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and pupillometry. Our results show that mind wandering was preceded by increases in finger-tapping variability, which was correlated with activity in dorsal and ventral attention networks. The entropy of random finger-tapping sequences was related to activity in frontoparietal regions associated with executive control, demonstrating the suitability of this paradigm for studying executive functioning. The neural correlates of behavioral performance, pupillary dynamics, and self-reported attentional state diverged, thus indicating a dissociation between direct and indirect markers of mind wandering. Together, the investigation of these relationships at both the behavioral and neural level provided novel insights into the identification of underlying mechanisms of mind wandering.
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Registered trials
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.