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Most people have had the experience of suddenly realizing that they have been engaging in a daydream or extended sequence of thought after walking or driving a considerable distance without taking note of the scenery. Often enough one may be in extended conversation with another person only to realize by some nonverbal cues that the listener is not actually listening. Sometimes a kind of blank stare provides the speaker with a clue that he is not being heeded. Instances of these failures to process incoming information are the frequent sources of controversy between a husband and wife if one realizes that the other is not listening to a discussion about household chores or personal problems. The present investigation represents part of a series of studies on the nature of daydreaming and related phenomena of the stream of thought. One important avenue of exploration has been an attempt to understand how the processing of internally generated content, or what has been called in some of the studies' "stimulus-independent thought" can go on while the subject is awake, with eyes open, presumably responsive in some fashion to the available information in his visual environment.Since most daydreaming appears to depend on visual imagery2 it would seem likely that the visual system is in some way implicated when a person, while wide-awake, perhaps seated on a bus or merely at his table carrying on some work, engages in a daydream. To shift attention to the fantasy he somehow reduces the extent of processing of stimulation available in his immediate environment. A series of studies in our laboratory have indicated that cognitive events resulting from either sensory inputs or memory inputs are produced by a common, limited-capacity cognitive system. Within this model there is proposed a reciprocal relationship such that an increase in the rate of operating on either internal or external channels leads to a reduction in the rate of operating on the alternate channel (although not necessarily in a direct proportion to this rate). When the information rate is high enough, one presumably cannot, except under very special circumstances, process the information in parallel fashion.l.3-7 There has been surprisingly little study of the relationship of the visual system to the processing of internally generated information such as daydreams, reminiscences, and related material from the long-term memory storage system.

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