A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the experience and context dependence of patterns of ongoing thought. These studies reveal that systems linked to attention and control are important for organizing experience in response to changing environmental demands. These studies also establish a role of the default mode network beyond task-negative or purely episodic content, for example, implicating it in the level of vivid detail in experience in both task contexts and in spontaneous self-generated experiential states. Together, this work demonstrates that the landscape of ongoing thought is reflected in the activity of multiple neural systems, and it is important to distinguish between processes contributing to how the experience unfolds from those linked to how these experiences are regulated.

Humans can estimate their confidence in making correct decisions. but these confidence judgments are biased by their other estimations, an effect known as confidence leak. However, it remains unclear whether this effect arises automatically. Here, we address this issue by having participants make two visual decisions and give confidence ratings for one or for both decisions within each trial. Using the well-known interaction between task difficulty and response accuracy as a proxy for confidence, we found that confidence ratings for one decision were greater when the other decision was also associated with greater confidence, even when the latter was not explicitly rated. For one of the two tasks, this confidence leak also occurred when participants knew in advance that no confidence rating would be required for the other task. Our results support the idea that confidence can be automatically integrated across decisions.

When people do multiple tasks at the same time, it is often found that their performance is worse relative to when they do those same tasks in isolation. H

Most mind-wandering paradigms use self-reports following task performance, but the extent to which these reports are confounded by performance cues is unknown. In two experiments with adult human participants, we examined whether self-reports and confidence therein are influenced by performance indicators during visual metronome response tasks. In Experiment 1 ( N = 40), sham feedback modulated reports independently of behavioral performance with participants more likely to report mind wandering after incorrect than correct sham feedback. In Experiment 2 ( N = 111), we replicated this pattern using a more implicit manipulation of perceived performance—a surreptitious delay in the onset of response targets. Participants were more likely to report mind wandering after this delay than they were in control trials. In both experiments, confidence in on-task reports was lower when the corresponding indicator (falsely) implied poor performance. These findings suggest that mind-wandering reports and experiential state confidence are partly confounded by performance monitoring and have implications for experience-sampling methodologies.