Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol 12(4), Dec 2025, 463-478; doi:10.1037/cns0000406
Research suggests that individuals have different phenomenological experiences across various tasks. However, little is known about how these experiences vary by task or over time. This study examined participants’ experiences of task-unrelated thoughts (i.e., TUTs), visual, and verbal thoughts across two experimental sessions and two different tasks. In addition, we examined relations between participants’ thoughts and key individual difference factors. In Session 1, participants (n = 85) engaged in a focused-attention meditation and a reading task, then completed a second identical session with a new text. Throughout both tasks, participants were prompted to report on the characteristics of their thoughts. Participants’ ratings of TUT, visual, and verbal thoughts were subject to change over time. Furthermore, on average, participants visualized more and had fewer TUTs while reading compared to meditation; however, no task difference was found for verbal-thinking reports. This suggests that visual imagery is more malleable than verbal-thinking. There was a strong negative correlation between visual and verbal thoughts, suggesting that at any given time, individuals’ thoughts tended to be either predominantly visual or verbal. Finally, individual differences in the tendency to become immersed in narratives and motivation to engage with other people’s perspectives (i.e., mind-reading motivation) were related to higher reports of visual imagery during reading, whereas verbal-thinking was negatively associated with mind-reading motivation and unrelated to TUT. Overall, this study revealed that individuals’ phenomenological experiences vary during tasks and across time, providing a foundation for future work to examine why and how variability in these phenomenological experiences emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)