Consciousness and cognition
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This review makes the case for 'dysanaesthesia', a term encompassing states of mind that can arise in the course of anaesthesia during surgery, characterised by an uncoupling of sensation and perceptual experience. This is reflected in a macroscopic, functional model of anaesthetically-relevant consciousness. Patients in this state can be aware of events but in a neutral way, not in pain, sometimes personally dissociated from the experiences. ⋯ The hypothesis can also explain the relatively high incidence of positive response to relatively direct questions for recall (e.g., using the Brice questionnaire; ∼1:500; the vast majority of these being neutral reports) versus the very low incidence of spontaneous reports of awareness (∼1:15,000; a higher proportion of these being adverse recollections). The hypothesis is consistent with relevant notions from philosophical discussions of consciousness, and neuroscientific evidence. Dysanaesthesia has important implications for research and also for the development of appropriate monitoring.
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Here we test the hypothesis that fluctuations in subjective reports of mind wandering over time-on-task are associated with fluctuations in performance over time-on-task. In Study 1, we employed a singleton search task and found that performance did not differ prior to on- and off-task reports, nor did individual differences in mind wandering predict differences in performance (so-called standard analytic methods). ⋯ These data indicate (1) a tight coupling between mind wandering and performance over time and (2) that a temporal-analytic approach can reveal effects of mind wandering on performance in tasks where standard analyses fail to do so. The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.