When
Where
Announcing:
Jessica Andrews-Hanna, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology; Cognitive Science Program
Director, Neuroscience of Emotion and Thought Lab
University of Arizona
Unbidden and Unbound: Towards a Science of Spontaneous Thought
Much of what we know about the human mind comes from carefully controlled experiments directing participants to think in a certain way or attend to a specific set of stimuli. Yet in real-world contexts, cognition often unfolds spontaneously, sometimes manifesting as loosely connected ideas, other times constrained by salient personal concerns and learned habits of thought. Although capturing spontaneous thoughts can be an elusive and messy endeavor, I will argue that a multi-methods approach – incorporating linguistic, self-report and neural metrics acquired in the lab and real-world settings – can be fruitful for illuminating states of mind, individual difference traits and age associations, and predictors of real-world behavioral and social outcomes. In this talk, I will describe my lab’s foray into measuring spontaneous thought, including ongoing efforts to investigate such thoughts as sensitive markers of pathological, therapeutic and societal change.
Please Note:
This colloquium will be offered in person (Psychology 306).
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Updated: 08/28/26