ORCID

Abstract

The goal of psychological research is to understand behaviour in daily life. Although lab studies provide the control necessary to identify cognitive mechanisms behind behaviour, how these controlled situations generalise to activities in daily life remains unclear. Experience-sampling provides useful descriptions of cognition in the lab and real world and the current study examined how thought patterns generated by multidimensional experience-sampling (mDES) generalise across both contexts. We combined data from five published studies to generate a common ‘thought-space’ using data from the lab and daily life. This space represented data from both lab and daily life in an unbiased manner and grouped lab tasks and daily life activities with similar features (e.g., working in daily life was similar to working memory in the lab). Our study establishes mDES can map cognition from lab and daily life within a common space, allowing for more ecologically valid descriptions of cognition and behaviour.

Publication Date

2025-01-01

Publication Title

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume

131

Issue

103853

ISSN

1053-8100

Acceptance Date

2025-03-24

Deposit Date

2025-04-10

Funding

Conflicts of interest: All authors declare no conflicts of interest. Funding: This research is supported by award to Dr. Jonathan Smallwood and Dr. Jeffery D. Wammes from the Government of Canada\u2019s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) [grant ID NFRF-2021\u201300183]. Artificial intelligence: No artificial intelligence assisted technologies were used in this research or the creation of this article. Ethics: This research complies with the Declaration of Helsinki (2023), aside from the requirement to preregister human subjects research, and received approval from a local ethics board (GREB IRB Number: IRB00003062). Computational reproducibility: The code used in this analysis is available on the ThoughtSpace Github linked in the article. The relevant datasets used in this article are available in their source publications.

Keywords

Cognitive-neuroscience, Ecological momentary assessment, Ecological validity, Experience-sampling, Principal component analysis, Spontaneous thought

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