Local sleep-like activity in wakefulness: temporal dynamics across cognitive states and traits of mind wandering and dissociation

Le résumé fourni par la source

This project investigates whether individual differences in vulnerability to mental fatigue, indexed by the tendency to develop local sleep-like activity during wakefulness, are associated with individual differences in the disposition toward internally oriented, task-decoupled cognition. To capture different and complementary ways in which attention can become disengaged from an ongoing activity, we selected four trait measures: spontaneous mind wandering (MW-S), which captures the tendency for attention to drift away from an ongoing activity toward spontaneously arising thoughts; deliberate mind wandering (MW-D), which captures the tendency to intentionally direct attention toward one’s own thoughts; everyday cognitive failures (CFQ), which captures the frequency of lapses in attention, perception and memory in daily life; and dissociative absorption (DES-Absorption), which captures the tendency to become deeply absorbed in a particular content. In a pilot study (N = 40) a principal component analysis indicated that these four measures reduce to two components: one grouping spontaneous mind wandering with cognitive failures, which we refer to as the spontaneous-failure component, and one grouping deliberate mind wandering and dissociative absorption, which we refer to as the deliberate-absorption component. The study will investigate whether vulnerability to local sleep-like activity is related to one or both of these tendencies. To address this question, we will examine local sleep-like activity during both resting-state and sustained attention, with a specific focus on its temporal dynamics across the experimental session and on its relationship with traits and behavioral performance. Specifically, participants complete an eyes-open resting-state EEG recording before the task, a prolonged Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) composed of three consecutive blocks, and a second eyes-open resting-state EEG recording after the task. Previous findings provide a basis for investigating whether individual vulnerability to local sleep-like activity is related to different tendencies toward task disengagement. Specifically, Andrillon et al. (2021) found that slow waves over frontal regions were accompanied by reports of mind wandering and by impulsive errors, that is, by a failure to withhold a prepotent response, whereas slow waves over posterior regions were accompanied by reports of mind blanking and by sluggish or missed responses. Based on these findings, local sleep-like activity may be particularly related to the tendency toward spontaneous mind wandering. However, this association may not be specific to spontaneous mind wandering and may extend to other forms of task disengagement captured by the four trait measures considered here. We will therefore examine how individual vulnerability to local sleep-like activity relates to these different trait tendencies.

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