Dr Julie Kam: The Affective and Neural Correlates of Mind Wandering

Abstract

An inevitable feature of our conscious experience is that our minds often shift away from task demands to our inner milieu. Often referred to as mind wandering, this phenomenon involves thoughts that are unrelated to the ongoing task. With growing recognition that mind wandering is highly prevalent in our everyday life and linked to wide ranging impacts on our daily functioning, there has been a surge of interest in understanding its links to brain functioning and mental health. In this talk, I will first establish the electrophysiological correlates of mind wandering, as a reliable, objective marker of the phenomenon. Next, I will review work that examined the association between mind wandering and affective wellbeing, exploring how this relationship changes across the lifespan and in clinical populations. Finally, I will discuss strategies that may help regulate the occurrence of mind wandering and modulate its link to affective wellbeing.

Bio

Dr. Julia Kam is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a full member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her lab aims to develop a mechanistic model of the neural basis of internal attention, and to ultimately drive the development of tools that optimise attentional control. In particular, the lab studies show how the human brain processes internal representations and aims to translate this research to applied and clinical contexts, including predicting attention states in the real world and studying this in psychiatric and neurological populations.