Experimental Philosophy and Cognitive Science

+ Zachary C. Irving, Catherine McGrath, Lauren Flynn, Aaron Glasser, and Caitlin Mills (2023) "The Shower Effect: Mind-Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation During Moderately Engaging Activities" Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

People often seem to generate creative ideas during moderately engaging activities, such as showing or walking. One explanation of this “shower effect” is that idea generation requires a balance between focused, linear thinking (which limits originality) and unbounded, random associations (which are rarely useful). Activities like walking may help us strike this balance by allowing mind-wandering in an engaging environment that places some constrains on thought. Although past studies have found an inconsistent relationship between mind-wandering and creative idea generation, they have two limitations. First, creativity researchers have not studied the paradigmatic form of mind-wandering: freely-moving thought. Second, studies have used boring tasks that may encourage unconstrained and unproductive mind-wandering. To overcome these limitations, we investigate the relationship between idea generation and freely-moving mind-wandering during boring versus engaging video tasks. Across two studies, we find that mind-wandering leads to more creative ideas during engaging activities. Boring activities lead to either more or more semantically distant ideas overall, but these effects are unrelated to mind-wandering. Boring activities may therefore lead to ideas by affording time for focused problem solving, whereas engaging activities may do so by encouraging productive mind-wandering.

+ Zachary C. Irving, Samuel Murray, Aaron Glasser, and Kristina Krasich (2023) "The Catch-22 of Forgetfulness: Responsibility for Mental Mistakes" Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Attribution theorists widely assume that people rely on character assessments to assign blame. But there is disagreement over why. One camp holds that character has a fundamental effect on blame. Another camp holds that character merely provides evidence about the mental states and processes that determine responsibility. We argue for a two-channel view, where character simultaneously has both fundamental and evidential effects on blame. In two large factorial studies (n = 505), participants rate whether someone is blameworthy when he makes a mistake (burns a cake or misses a bus stop). Although mental state inferences predict blame judgments, character assessments do not. Studies 3 and 4 (n = 447) perform a mediation analysis and find that character assessments (about forgetfulness) influence responsibility via two channels, one direct and another indirect. Forgetfulness directly increases judgments of responsibility, presumably because one’s mistakes manifest bad character. But forgetfulness also decreases judgments of state control, which indirectly decreases responsibility judgments. These two channels cancel out, which is why we find no aggregate effect of forgetfulness on responsibility. Our results challenge several fundamental assumptions in the role of character in moral judgment, including that good character always decreases blame.

+ Zachary C. Irving, Jordan Bridges, Aaron Glasser, Juan Pablo Bermúdez, and Chandra Sripada (2022) "Will-powered: Synchronic regulation is the difference maker for self-control" Cognition

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically, agents typically use willpower (synchronic regulation) to achieve their plans to avoid temptation (diachronic regulation). So even if cases of diachronic regulation seem to involve self-control, this may be because they are contaminated by synchronic regulation. We therefore developed a novel multifactorial method to disentangle synchronic and diachronic regulation. Using this method, we find that ordinary usage assumes that only synchronic––not diachronic––regulation counts as self-control. We find this pattern across four experiments involving different kinds of temptation, as well as a paradigmatic case of diachronic regulation based on the classic story of Odysseus and the Sirens. Our final experiment finds that self-control in a diachronic case depends on whether the agent uses synchronic regulation at two moments: when she (1) initiates and (2) follows-through on a plan to resist temptation. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that synchronic regulation is the sole difference maker in the folk concept of self-control.

+ Samuel Murray, Kristina Krasich, Zachary C. Irving, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Felipe De Brigard (2022) "Mental Control and Attributions of Blame for Negligent Wrongdoers" Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility.

+ Julia Kam, Zachary C. Irving, Caitlin Mills, Alison Gopnik, and Robert T Knight (2021) "Distinct Electrophysiological Signatures of Task-Unrelated and Dynamic Thought" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Humans spend much of their lives engaging with their internal train of thoughts. Traditionally, research focused on whether these thoughts are related to tasks or not, and have identified reliable but distinct behavioural and neural correlates of task-unrelated and task-related thought. A recent theoretical framework highlighted a different aspect of thinking – how it dynamically moves between topics. However, the neural correlates of such thought dynamics are unknown. The current study aimed to determine the electrophysiological signatures of these dynamics by recording EEG while participants performed an attention task, and periodically answered thought sampling questions about whether their thoughts were 1) task-unrelated, 2) freely moving, 3) deliberately constrained, and 4) automatically constrained. We examined three EEG measures across different time windows as a function of each thought type: stimulus- evoked P3 event-related potentials, and non-stimulus evoked alpha power and variability. Parietal P3 was larger for task-related relative to task-unrelated thoughts, whereas frontal P3 was increased for deliberately constrained compared to unconstrained thoughts. Frontal electrodes showed enhanced alpha power for freely moving thoughts relative to non-freely moving thoughts. Alpha power variability was increased for task-unrelated, freely moving, and unconstrained thoughts. Our findings indicate distinct electrophysiological patterns associated with task-unrelated and dynamic thoughts, suggesting these neural measures capture the heterogeneity of our ongoing thoughts.

+ Zachary C Irving, Aaron Glasser, Alison Gopnik, Chandra Sripada (2020) “What Does ‘Mind-Wandering’ Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation” Cognitive Science

Although mind-wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term "mind-wandering" means. Four prominent views define mind-wandering as 1) task-unrelated thought, 2) stimulus-independent thought, 3) unintentional thought, or 4) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind-wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (N=545) with vignettes that describe someone’s thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to the four major accounts of mind-wandering. Dynamics explains between four and forty times more variance in participants’ mind-wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (N=153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind-wandering. Our final study (N=277) used vignettes that resemble mind-wandering experiments. Dynamics had significant and large effects, while task-unrelatedness was non-significant. These results strongly suggest that the central feature of mind-wandering is its dynamics.

+ Caitlin Mills, Quentin Raffaelli, Zachary C Irving, Dylan Stan, Kalina Christoff "Is an off-task mind a freely-moving mind? Examining the relationship between different dimensions of thought" (2018) Consciousness and Cognition

Mind wandering is frequently defined as task-unrelated or perceptually decoupled thought. However, these definitions may not capture the dynamic features of a wandering mind, such as its tendency to 'move freely'. Here we test the relationship between three theoretically dissociable dimensions of thought: freedom of movement in thought, task-relatedness, and perceptual decoupling (i.e., lack of awareness of surroundings). Using everyday life experience sampling, thought probes were randomly delivered to participants’ phones for ten days. Results revealed weak intra-individual correlations between freedom of movement in thought and task-unrelatedness, as well as perceptual decoupling. Within our dataset, over 40% of thoughts would have been misclassified under the assumption that off-task thought is inherently freely moving. Overall, freedom of movement appears to be an independent dimension of thought that is not captured by the two most common measures of mind wandering. Future work focusing on the dynamics of thought may be crucial for improving our understanding of the wandering mind.

+ Matt L. Dixon, Jessica Andrews-Hanna, R Nathan Spreng, Zachary C Irving, and Kalina Christoff (2017) "Interactions between the default network and dorsal attention network vary across default subsystems, time, and cognitive states" Neuroimage

Anticorrelation between the default network (DN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) is thought to be anintrinsic aspect of functional brain organization reflecting competing functions. However, the effect size offunctional connectivity (FC) between the DN and DAN has yet to be established. Furthermore, the stability ofanticorrelations across distinct DN subsystems, different contexts, and time, remains unexplored. In study 1 wesummarize effect sizes of DN-DAN FC from 20 studies, and in study 2 we probe the variability of DN-DANinteractions across six different cognitive states in a new data set. We show that: (i) the DN and DAN have anindependent rather than anticorrelated relationship when global signal regression is not used (median effectsize across studies: r=−.06; 95% CI:−.15 to .08); (ii) the DAN exhibits weak negative FC with the DN Coresubsystem but is uncorrelated with the dorsomedial prefrontal and medial temporal lobe subsystems; (iii) DN-DAN interactions vary significantly across different cognitive states; (iv) DN-DAN FCfluctuates across timebetween periods of anticorrelation and periods of positive correlation; and (v) changes across time in thestrength of DN-DAN coupling are coordinated with interactions involving the frontoparietal control network(FPCN). Overall, the observed weak effect sizes related to DN-DAN anticorrelation suggest the need to re-conceptualize the nature of interactions between these networks. Furthermore, ourfindings demonstrate thatDN-DAN interactions are not stable, but rather, exhibit substantial variability across time and context, and arecoordinated with broader network dynamics involving the FPCN.