Recruiting interdisciplinary expertise to explore fundamental questions regarding living systems and the physical world

Mind wandering is typically measured using rare, disruptive thought probes. This study shows that trial-by-trial fluctuations in attentional states can be inferred from behavior alone using a biased perceptual task and computational modeling.

Gheza and Kool show that, in multidimensional environments, people allocate attention to individual distractors on the basis of their interference with the current task. They develop a neural model that supports these findings and suggest that cognitive control theories need to be revised.