The validity of the online thought-probing procedure of mind wandering is not threatened by variations of probe rate and probe framing.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the measurement of mind wandering during ongoing tasks. The frequently used online thought-probing procedure (OTPP), in which individuals are probed on whether their thoughts are on-task or not while performing an ongoing task, has repeatedly been criticized, because variations in the frequency of thought probes and the order in which on-task and off-task thoughts are referred to have been shown to affect mind-wandering rates. Hitherto, it is unclear whether this susceptibility to measurement variation only affects mean response rates in probe-caught mind wandering or poses an actual threat to the validity of the OTPP, endangering the replicability and generalizability of study results. Here, we show in a sample of 177 students that variations of the frequency or framing of thought probes do not affect the validity of the OTPP. While we found that more frequent thought probing reduced the rate of probe-caught mind wandering, we did not replicate the effect that mind wandering is more likely to be reported when off-task thoughts are referred to first rather than second. Crucially, associations between probe-caught mind wandering and task performance, as well as associations between probe-caught mind wandering and covariates (trait mind wandering, reaction-time variability in the metronome-response task, and working-memory capacity) did not change with variations of the probing procedure. Therefore, it seems unlikely that the great heterogeneity in the way the OTPP is implemented across different studies endangers the replicability and generalizability of study results. Data and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/7w8bm/ .

Using a Real-Time Locating System to Measure Walking Activity Associated with Wandering Behaviors Among Institutionalized Older Adults.

A real-time locating system (RTLS) can be used to track the walking activity of institutionalized older adults in long-term care who are at risk for wandering behaviors. The benefits of a RTLS are objective and continuous measurements of activity. Self-report methods of activity, especially wandering, by health care staff are vulnerable to floor effects and recall bias, and continuous clinical or research observation over the long-term can be time-consuming and expensive. Health care staff also fail to recognize the onset and/or duration of wandering behaviors, which are associated with a variety of adverse health outcomes in this population but amenable to intervention. RTLS technologies can measure the walking activity of institutionalized residents with cognitive impairment over time with a high degree of accuracy. This is particularly useful for the study of wandering, defined as walking for at least 60 seconds with few (if any) breaks in activity. Wandering is associated with disease progression, hospitalizations, falls and death. Previous work suggests older adults with poor balance ability and high sustained walking activity may be particularly susceptible to poor health outcomes. RTLS's are used to assess cognitive impairment and factors associated with gait and balance; however, supplemental paper and pencil gait/balance tools may be used to further refine risk profiles. This project discusses the use of a RTLS to measure walking activity and also gait quality and balance ability measures on this population.

Ruminative minds, wandering minds: Effects of rumination and mind wandering on lexical associations, pitch imitation and eye behaviour.

This study demonstrates that rumination is reflected in two behavioural signals that both play an important role in face-to-face interactions and provides evidence for the negative impact of rumination on social cognition. Sixty-one students were randomly assigned either to a condition in which rumination was induced or to a control condition. Their task was to play a speech-based word association game with an Embodied Conversational Agent during which their word associations, pitch imitation and eye movements were measured. Two questionnaires assessed their ruminative tendencies and mind wandering thoughts, respectively. Rumination predicted differences in task-related mind wandering, polarity of lexical associations, pitch imitation, and blinks while mind wandering predicted differences in saccades. This outcome may show that rumination has a negative impact on certain aspects of social interactions.

Wandering Pattern Sensing at S-Band.

Increasing prevalence of dementia has posed several challenges for care-givers. Patients suffering from dementia often display wandering behavior due to boredom or memory loss. It is considered to be one of the challenging conditions to manage and understand. Traits of dementia patients can compromise their safety causing serious injuries. This paper presents investigation into the design and evaluation of wandering scenarios with patients suffering from dementia using an S-band sensing technique. This frequency band is the wireless channel commonly used to monitor and characterize different scenarios including random, lapping, and pacing movements in an indoor environment. Wandering patterns are characterized depending on the received amplitude and phase information of that measures the disturbance caused in the ideal radio signal. A secondary analysis using support vector machine is used to classify the three patterns. The results show that the proposed technique carries high classification accuracy up to 90% and has good potential for healthcare applications.

Mind Wandering and Task-Focused Attention: ERP Correlates.

Previous studies looking at how Mind Wandering (MW) impacts performance in distinct Focused Attention (FA) systems, using the Attention Network Task (ANT), showed that the presence of pure MW thoughts did not impact the overall performance of ANT (alert, orienting and conflict) performance. However, it still remains unclear if the lack of interference of MW in the ANT, reported at the behavioral level, has a neurophysiological correspondence. We hypothesize that a distinct cortical processing may be required to meet attentional demands during MW. The objective of the present study was to test if, given similar levels of ANT performance, individuals predominantly focusing on MW or FA show distinct cortical processing. Thirty-three healthy participants underwent an EEG high-density acquisition while they were performing the ANT. MW was assessed following the ANT using an adapted version of the Resting State Questionnaire (ReSQ). The following ERP's were analyzed: pN1, pP1, P1, N1, pN, and P3. At the behavioral level, participants were slower and less accurate when responding to incongruent than to congruent targets (conflict effect), benefiting from the presentation of the double (alerting effect) and spatial (orienting effect) cues. Consistent with the behavioral data, ERP's waves were discriminative of distinct attentional effects. However, these results remained true irrespective of the MW condition, suggesting that MW imposed no additional cortical demand in alert, orienting, and conflict attention tasks.

Beyond V40.31: Narrative Phenomenology of Wandering in Autism and Dementia.

Research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and other types of dementia describes a behaviour called 'wandering', a term that denotes movement through space lacking intention or exact destination, as when a person is disoriented or not self-aware. In the U.S., 'wandering' in both ASD and AD has been examined mostly from a management and prevention perspective. It prioritizes safety while primarily overlooking personal experiences of those who 'wander' and their families, thus limiting the range of potentially effective strategies to address this issue. Communicative challenges faced by many people diagnosed with ASD and AD further obscure the experiential, existential aspects of 'wandering'. This article reflects an increasing concern of social science scholars interested in whether and how the conceptual and practical strategies to address 'wandering' are informed by the situated experiences of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and their families. We examine 'wandering' at the intersections of personal experience, family life, clinical practice, public health policy, and legislation, as a conceptually rich site where notions of personhood, subjectivity, intentionality, and quality of life powerfully and consequentially converge to impact the lives of many people with ASD and AD, and their families. We draw upon critical autism studies describing how attributions of personhood, subjectivity, intentionality, rational agency, and moral autonomy of people with ASD have been contingent upon the norms and conventions governing movement of the human body through space (Hilton, Afr Am Rev 50(2):221-235, 2017). When this movement is deemed aberrant, the person may be construed as irrational, a danger to self because of a lack of self-awareness, and a danger to others because of a lack of empathy. These attributions put the person at risk of being excluded from the considerations and, more importantly, the obligations of the 'moral community' to ensure that he or she has a 'good human life' (Barnbaum, The Ethics of Autism: Among Them but not of Them. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008; Silvers and Francis, Metaphilosophy 40(3/4):475-498, 2009). Using ethnographic, narrative phenomenological (Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), and medical humanities (Charon, JAMA 286:1897-1902, 2001; Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) approaches, we examine multiple perspectives on 'wandering' in ASD and AD across narrative discourse genres, institutional contexts, and media of representation. We argue for an extension of the prevention and management view to focus not only on safety but also on what phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962) called "having a world" (p. 146). The analysis is intended to inform clinical practice, policy and public health efforts to enhance understanding of first and second person perspectives on 'wandering' in order to improve the participation and quality of life of people with ASD and AD who 'wander', and their families.

Mind wandering simultaneously prolongs reactions and promotes creative incubation.

Mind wandering (MW) refers to the disengagement of attention from the external environment and the generation of thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. It is a ubiquitous cognitive process resulting in lapses of attention. MW imposes a negative impact on attention-based task performance, but also has been associated with enhanced creativity and future planning. In three experiments we show that MW relates simultaneously to both behavioral costs but also benefits. Behavioral costs were measured by prolonged reaction times (RT) in sustained attention to response tasks (SART), whereas the benefits were observed as improved performance in the creative problem solving and daily routine planning tasks performed after the SART. Additionally, we found an increased dispersion of RTs during MW suggesting that attention during these times underwent dynamical changes compared to states when participants were fully focused on the task. Our results support a model in which MW deteriorates performance in the task at hand and is related to dynamical changes in attention. At the same time it is also able to improve human capacity for complex operations.

Wandering: Unearthing New Tracking Devices.

Wandering away from home or facilities is dangerous for patients with dementia and stressful for families and caregivers when those who go missing cannot be located. Up to 60% of Alzheimer's disease patients wander, and up to 50% of those who are not found within 24 hours face serious injury or death. Currently, no effective drug therapies exist to abate wandering, which has multiple causes, but emerging technologies offer a promise of comfort in being able to easily locate a missing loved one. As of 2012, 41 states had enacted Silver Alert programs that broadcast information about missing, vulnerable adults. Numerous technologies, such as wearable global positioning system trackers and temporary barcodes worn on fingernails, exist to ease the fears of families and caregivers, locate residents, and hasten their return. While these strategies offer promise, issues of expense, effectiveness, privacy, and ethics remain.

Movement Path Tortuosity in Free Ambulation: Relationships to Age and Brain Disease.

Ambulation is defined by duration, distance traversed, number and size of directional changes, and the interval separating successive movement episodes; more complex measures of ambulation can be created by aggregating these features. This review article of published findings defines random changes in direction during movement as "movement path tortuosity" and relates tortuosity to the understanding of cognitive impairments of persons of all ages. Path tortuosity is quantified by subjecting tracking data to fractal analysis, specifically Fractal Dimension (Fractal D), which ranges from a value of 1 when the movement path is perfectly straight to a value of 2 when the movement path is random, resembling the "drunkard's walk." The review elucidates the mathematical assumptions underlying Fractal D, its use in the analysis of movements of free ranging animals, and its application to the study of cognitive impairment and the prediction of falls in older adults. We conclude Fractal D offers a reliable, valid, sensitive, and easily interpreted real-time longitudinal measure of unrestricted movement path tortuosity unaffected by mobility aid use.

On the Necessity of Distinguishing Between Unintentional and Intentional Mind Wandering.

In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the number of studies examining mind wandering. Although participants' reports of mind wandering are often assumed to largely reflect spontaneous, unintentional thoughts, many researchers' conceptualizations of mind wandering have left open the possibility that at least some of these reports reflect deliberate, intentional thought. Critically, however, in most investigations on the topic, researchers have not separately assessed each type of mind wandering; instead, they have measured mind wandering as a unitary construct, thereby conflating intentional and unintentional types. We report the first compelling evidence that an experimental manipulation can have qualitatively different effects on intentional and unintentional types of mind wandering. This result provides clear evidence that researchers interested in understanding mind wandering need to consider the distinction between unintentional and intentional occurrences of this phenomenon.

Wandering behavior of a severely demented patient with frontotemporal dementia.

Although wandering is a common behavioral problem in patients with dementia, information about wandering in patients with severe dementia is scarce. This study analyzed data about the wandering behavior of a 77-year-old woman with severe frontotemporal dementia. Due to severe atrophy of the anterior cortex, she was totally unable to act spontaneously. Nevertheless, she walked with her husband every day. Her walking pattern varied on a daily basis but it appeared to be random. However, a mathematical analysis showed that her walking pattern was not random. Our case suggests that even patients with severe atrophy in the anterior cortex may be able to orient themselves within their neighborhood if their posterior cortex is preserved.

A unified grid-based wandering pattern detection algorithm.

The aim of this study was to develop and validate a robust algorithm for indoor and outdoor wandering pattern detection and to analyse the relationship of these patterns to other clinical measures. Much of the previous work in this area addressed the measurement of wandering indoors or outdoors and to the best of our knowledge, there has not been a unified algorithm proposed which can deal with both scenarios. We present a novel grid-based layout representation strategy to identify the patterns, which is applicable to both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The algorithm is sufficiently robust to identify interleaving and hybrid patterns and performed with identification accuracy of 90% on a real-world sample.

A new safety support system for wandering elderly persons.

We have developed a new mobile phone-based safety support system for transmitting information of a wandering elderly person's location and the environmental sounds around that person. The system consists of a wearable sensor and a conventional desktop PC with Internet access acting as the server computer. The wearable sensor, which is attached behind the neck of the elderly person's shirt, is composed of a low transmitting power mobile phone (W-SIM), a small microphone and a one chip microcontroller. The wandering elderly person's location is identified within 100 m from the mobile phone company's antenna ID via the W-SIM. The caregiver sets the elderly person's movement area by specialized computer software. When the elderly person goes out of the area, the sensor automatically records the environmental sound around the wandering elderly person for the presumption of the person's situation with the small microphone. The W-SIM sends both the wandering elderly person's location and the environmental sound to the server computer. The server computer informs automatically the caregiver by the e-mail. The caregiver can monitor the sound and the map of the wandering person's location via Internet. The sound enables the presumption of an accurate location and the situation of the wandering elderly person.

Cue conditions and wayfinding in older and younger women.

This study examined how varying the salience and complexity of environmental cues affects place learning in older versus younger women. Place learning is a critical cognitive function for wayfinding in new or changed environments that becomes impaired with age in many people. Environments such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities typically have poorly differentiated environments. Environmental modifications that influence how older adults learn places more effectively are not known. It was hypothesized that salient cues (prominent and distinctive) are particularly important to place learning. The Computer-Generated Arena was used to test this hypothesis in 20 healthy older (age 65+) women and 6 healthy younger (ages 18 to 35) women. Analyses of the data showed differences in place learning with respect to cue salience, complexity, and age, with younger women being much more proficient in the place learning task and with the best overall learning in the salient and complex cue conditions.