Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Involuntary mental time travel (MTT) is spontaneously reliving past events or envisioning future scenarios without conscious effort. We explored the phenomenological characteristics and contents of self-caught and probe-caught spontaneous thoughts, focusing on involuntary MTTs. These paradigms differ in the meta-awareness they demand, which may affect the nature of the captured thoughts, especially under attentional load. During a vigilance task with different attentional loads, participants reported their thoughts as they realized them (self-caught) or when the task prompted them (probe-caught). They then completed questionnaires regarding their thoughts’ phenomenological characteristics. We predict that self-caught thoughts will have a higher proportion of involuntary MTTs, marked by episodic and self-related content. Under high attentional load, involuntary MTTs are expected to comprise a larger proportion of reported thoughts in both paradigms. Investigating the characteristics of spontaneous thoughts and their modulation by attentional load contributes to a deeper understanding of the metacognitive processes underlying involuntary MTTs.