title: Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts? Investigating the Nature of the Wandering Mind and How to Capture It
creator: Steindorf, Lena
subject: ddc-150
subject: 150 Psychology
description: This dissertation aims at painting a balanced picture of the wandering mind’s nature, strengthening an adaptive view of the phenomenon of drifting thoughts. First, negative consequences of drifting thoughts will be contrasted with positive ones, and I further aim to bring both sides of the medal more in line by focusing on thought-regulation processes. Previous insights will then be enriched by new contributions: I will introduce memory as a newly considered domain, which I found to benefit from mind-wandering processes. From a more methodological perspective and within the domains of creativity and problem-solving, I will not only take a look at possible further mind-wandering benefits, but also present a new research paradigm. This paradigm allows for the closer investigation of possibly thought-altering and intrusive effects of thought probes, the most widely applied mind-wandering assessment method. Thought probes ask participants about their current thoughts during a task and might thus modify the mind-wandering experience itself, thereby complicating the search for positive effects of the phenomenon. As such probes further rely on self-reports and thus contain a subjective component, I will finally report a review and validation study of eye-movement measures as objective mind-wandering indicators. Thus, this dissertation presents an investigation of the nature of the wandering mind as well as of subjective and objective thought-assessment methods.
date: 2020
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/28771/1/Dissertation_Steindorf_Nature_of_the_Wandering_Mind_PDFA.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00028771
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-287712
identifier:   Steindorf, Lena  (2020) Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts? Investigating the Nature of the Wandering Mind and How to Capture It.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/28771/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng