History
The history of mind wandering research dates back to 18th century England. British philosophers struggled to determine whether this phenomenon was occurring within the mind or whether there were outside sources affecting it. In 1921, Varendonck published The Psychology of Day-Dreams, in which he traced his "trains of thoughts' to identify their origins, most often apparently irrelevant external influences. Wallas (1926) considered mind-wandering as an important aspect of his second stage of creative thought - incubation. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the first documented studies were conducted on mind wandering. John Antrobus and Jerome Singer developed a questionnaire and discussed the experience of mind wandering in their article “Mind Wandering and Cognitive Structure”. This questionnaire, known as the Imaginal Processes Inventory (IPI), provides a trait measure of mind wandering and it assess the experience on three dimensions: 1. How vivid the persons thoughts are. 2. How many of those thoughts are guilt or fear based, and 3. How deep into the thought are person goes. Since very few studies have been done on the subject and very little is known about mind wandering it is still a developing topic in psychology.
Read more about this topic: Mind-wandering
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