Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (Mar 2015)
Characterization of Mind Wandering using fNIRS
Abstract
Assessing whether someone is attending to a task has become importantfor educational and professional applications. Such attentional drifts are usually termed mind wandering. The purpose of the current study is to test to what extent a recent neural imaging modality can be used to detect mind wandering episodes. Functional near infra-red spectroscopy is a non-invasive neuro-imaging technique that has never been studied so far to measure mind wandering. The Sustained Attention to Response Task was used to assess when subjects attention leaves a primary task. 16-channel fNIRS data were collected over frontal cortices. We observed significant activations over the medial prefrontal cortex during mind wandering, a brain region associated with the default mode network. fNIRS data were used to classify mind wandering data above chance level. In line with previous brain-imaging studies of mind wandering, our results confirm the ability of fNIRS to detect Default Network activations in the context of mind wandering.
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