Commentary on our mind-wandering paper
Commentary on our mind-wandering paper
Vadim Axelrod and Andrei R. Teodorescu wrote an interesting commentary on our recent mind-wandering paper that was published in The Journal of Neuroscience last year. I am happy that they are supportive of our approach and glad about the constructive comments that they give in their paper.
I am particularly happy that someone has gone to the difficulty of summarizing and contextualizing our paper because I think that it is actually quite hard to read. I think it is a strength of our paper that it combines complex from different modalities (fMRI, rsfMRI, pupil diameter, behaviour) with sophisticated analysis techniques (MVPA techniques, cognitive modeling, Bayesian stats). However, this particular feature makes the paper very hard to read, I think. I tried my best to prepare the paper in a readable way but found it quite challenging to present the paper in a both comprehensive and easy-to-read format. Axelrod & Teodorescu's comment solves this problem for me because there is now an easy-to-read summary out there that is independent of our main paper and therefore does not have the obligation to comprehensively detail the used methodology.
I wish there was a commentary on all empirical papers...
There is one more comment I'd like to make regarding the commentary. In their comment, the authors focus on different model parameters that might be beneficial to study in the mind-wandering context. I do agree and I think the MW field should really dig deeper into the cognitive modeling research that has been done in other fields. For our own data however, it was not possible to focus on the parameters suggested by Axelrod and Teodorescu. As I commented in an e-mail to Vadim Axelrod:
As you note in one part of your paper, the stop-signal paradigm (at least the version we used) did not produce many behavioural errors which make it hard to constrain the more flexible models (such as those estimating between-trial variability). This was one of the reasons we pursued the relatively simple model we ended up with (and used a Bayesian hierarchical modeling approach for incorporating fits for subjects who did not have many errors).
References
- Axelrod V and Teodorescu AR (2015) Commentary: When the brain takes a break: a model-based analysis of mind wandering. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 9:83. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2015.00083
- Mittner, M., Boekel, W., Tucker, A. M., Turner, B.M., Heathcote, A. and Forstmann, B.U. (2014). When the brain takes a break: A model-based analysis of mind wandering. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(49):16286-95.