Effie J. Pereira

Effie J. Pereira

Assistant Professor

How much control do we have on our minds?

1 minute read

Published:

Great to have the first of my mind wandering papers out with my wonderful colleague Lauri Gurguryan. This work started 5 years ago as part of her undergraduate thesis project when she was working in our lab, and although it was stuck in triage for quite a while, we’re glad to finally see this in press.

One of the projects Lauri and I worked on was why we see such disparate outcomes of mind wandering behaviours, such that some individuals might have negative consequences when their mind wanders, whereas others have benefits. We thought that these differences might be due to internal characteristics, such that some people might have better control over how and when their mind wanders, which then allows them to use mind wandering for strategic purposes. Our paper in Frontiers found exactly this – individuals who have a lower ability to regulate and control their attention experience more negative outcomes across work / academic performance when they mind wander, and those who have higher ability experience more positive outcomes.

Although this paper was years in the making, we’re really proud to have this piece out as a prelude to our forthcoming papers characterizing temporal dynamics in mind wandering to predict real world outcomes.

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