At the heart of my book––and model of mental action––is a tripartite distinction between three modes of attention: goal-directed, salience-driven, and wandering. The first two are guided to remain on topic, either by executive control (goal-directed) or by salience. In contrast, mind-wandering is not guided to remain in place, so attention is free to drift between topics unchecked. I therefore define mind-wandering as unguided attention.

My tripartite distinction motivates a two-dimensional model of the attention and mental action that I call the "Thinking Grid" (See Below). The Wandering Mind draws implications of this model for central questions about mental action, including (but not limited to) action awareness, reasons, trying, the limits of action, and the distinction between bodily and mental agency. Below, I discuss other projects that draw implications of this model for mind-wandering science and moral psychology. Once we get our taxonomy right, I argue, much else follows.

My work on mental action extends to various other questions. "Will-Powered" (at Cognition) experimentally investigates another kind of mental action: self-control. Across six experiments, we find that ordinary people believe that all self-control involves mental action (specifically willpower). This directly contradicts a growing consensus in philosophy and science, which is that much self-control relies on the environment rather than the agent's action. My paper under submission with Aaron Glasser, "Affect in Action," argues that the obsessive thinking involves a particularly strong form of occurrent mental action: it is (often) guided at the personal level, endorsed, and resistible. Obsessive thinking nonetheless feels passive, we argue, because of how we fail to control the aggregation of mental actions over time. This motivates a distinction between what we call occurrent and aggregative agency.