Figure 4

Prevalence of the three covert experiential states identified in the current study, during a simple sustained attention task, in other task contexts from an independent sample. (a) Word clouds representing the three experiential states identified by applying principal components analysis to the experience sampling data from the current study. The first describes patterns of off-task episodic social cognition, the second describes patterns of deliberate task focus, and the third describes patterns of verbal, self-relevant thought. Each item represents one of the 13 experience sampling items, the size of the word represents the magnitude of the component loading for that item, and the color represents the direction (warmer colors = positive loading, cooler colors = negative loading). We projected these three thought patterns, identified in the current study's data, onto experience sampling data from a previously published study²² by Konu et al. in which participants completed a wide range of conventional and naturalistic tasks in the behavioral laboratory, and described their experiences using the same battery of mDES questions (see “Materials and methods”). (b) Bar graphs showing the estimated marginal means (i.e., predicted means) of each thought pattern for each task context reported by Konu et al.²², estimated in a series of linear mixed models in which each thought pattern was the outcome variable and task context was the explanatory variable (N participants = 70, N observations = 2302; see “Materials and methods”). Y-axis shows the different task contexts and x-axis shows estimated marginal means. Each bar plot represents a different thought pattern, corresponding to the word cloud shown above in panel (a). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. (c) Word clouds representing the estimated marginal means for each task context for each thought pattern presented in panel (b). Each word represents one of the task contexts, the size of the word represents the magnitude of the estimated marginal mean, and the color represents the direction (warmer colors = positive, cooler colors = negative).