One purpose of this work is to determine the parameters of task- unrelated-thought-intrusions (TUTs, daydreaming/mindwandering) as well as related mental activity such as insight, attention and sustained attention as phenomena and their relationship among one another and their susceptibility to the influence of aging in adulthood. The purposes are accomplished through the use of controlled laboratory studies and retrospective questionnaires. Outcomes derived from these purposes and obtained during the reporting year were: (a) the time course of TUT likelihood in the laboratory was an asymptotic exponential function in the first 15 minutes with a linearly increasing component thereafter, (b) TUT production was found to show high reliability between testing sessions separated by several months, (c) TUT production and conscious thought generativity were shown to covary. Efforts over the next fiscal year will include an analysis of: (a) 7- 10 year longitudinal changes in retrospectively reported daydreaming characteristics, (b) relationships between aspects of sexual activity in women and their level of sexual daydreaming, (c) the relation of TUT frequency during vigilance to general retrospective reports of daydreaming, (d) the relation between the attentional demands of a vigilance task and the frequency of TUTS, (e) the relation between endogenous and exogenous influences on arousal/activation and the frequency of TUTs during a laboratory task, (f) the extent to which practice on sustained attention tasks can moderate age differences in initial performance, and (g) the production of TUTs as a function of the difficulty of a reading task and subject interest in and prior knowledge of the semantic content of the reading.
