Can participants authoritatively report on the emotional valence of their mind wandering?

Abstract

Individuals might vary in their ability to accurately monitor their ongoing conscious experiences of mind wandering. Such findings have serious implications for understanding the accuracy of participants' ability to report their ongoing thoughts. We extend these previous findings to ask if individuals vary in the ability to accurately monitor and report on the emotional valence of their task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Participants completed a sustained attention task with periodic thought probes asking about emotional valence of their TUTs. Following these thought reports, they provided a confidence judgement. Participants were less confident in their TUTs compared to on-task reports. Among emotionally valenced TUTs, participants were more confident when reporting negatively valenced TUTs but less (and similarly) confident when reporting neutral and positive TUTs. Confidence moderated the within-subject relationship between positive TUTs and no-go accuracy. There was no moderating effect of confidence on more covert measures of mind wandering including mean response time or response time variability. We discuss the implications of these findings by suggesting that while people might vary in their ability to monitor and report on different aspects of their mind wandering, it is also possible that performance-induced confounds are introduced that could muddy the reliability of these reports.