Measuring the Frequency of Inner-Experience Characteristics

Abstract

Inner experience is widely accepted by psychologists and lay people as being straightforwardly observable: Inner speech, visual images, feelings, and so on are understood to be directly apprehendable “before the footlights of consciousness.” Many psychologists hold that such characteristics of inner experience play substantial theoretical roles and have applied significance across a wide range of cognitive, affective, performance, and clinical situations. If so, the frequency of occurrence of these characteristics is of fundamental importance. Such frequencies are usually estimated by questionnaires or by questionnaire-based experience sampling. However, there are reasons to wonder about the accuracy of such questionnaire-based estimates. We present three studies that compared, head-to-head, questionnaire-based experiential frequencies with frequencies discovered using descriptive experience sampling (DES), a method for random sampling in the natural environment that aspires to apprehend inner experience with as high fidelity as the state of the art allows. Together, they suggest that estimates of inner-experience frequency produced by questionnaires and DES are irreconcilably discrepant: Questionnaire-based methods produced dramatically higher (from 2 to 4 times as high) frequencies than did DES. These results suggest caution when interpreting questionnaire-based experiential results and the importance of additional high-fidelity studies of inner experience.

Mind over body: Interfering with the inner voice is detrimental to endurance performance

“…Reports are more likely to be accurate if participants are asked to simply report their experiences without attempting to theorise about the causes of their behaviour (Berger et al, 2016;Johansson et al, 2005;Petitmengin et al, 2013). This is in line with previous findings that questionnaire measures of inner speech have low correlation with more direct measures like experience sampling (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015a;Hurlburt et al, 2022).…”

Inner speech in the daily lives of people with aphasia

“…Only one study, to our knowledge, had ever used descriptive experience sampling in aphasia (to study flow states; Sather et al, 2017). While the best practice for dynamic sampling of inner speech appears to be mixed methodology involving descriptive experience sampling (Hurlburt et al, 2021), thought listing and interviews (Racy et al, 2020), andsurveys (Alderson-Day et al, 2018;Racy et al, 2020Racy et al, , 2022, we were not sure if this was feasible before undertaking this project. The low number of total dropouts and the high session completion is encouraging.…”

“…No matter its name, this type of assessment is defined by three critical features: people are assessed in their natural environments; researchers attempt to measure events or experiences in real-time; and researchers intensively assess people over time, such as several assessments per day across a week (Hektner et al, 2007). DES is appealing to measure inner speech because inner speech is known to vary by context and thought to not be present all of the time (Hurlburt et al, 2021). Therefore, using intensive, longitudinal methods in a real environment may most sensitively and accurately reflect experiences of inner speech.…”

“…It was very important for the fidelity of the study to ensure that all participants were on the same page about what "inner speech" was, which has been made clear by other individuals using similar methods to study inner speech (Hurlburt et al, 2021;Racy et al, 2020). Therefore, not only did the first meeting involve identifying inclusion and exclusion parameters and highlighting the experiment (especially its longitudinal nature), it involved a detailed discussion (also using visual aids) between the participant and author JA about what inner speech is and isn't (Table 3).…”

Modulation of Mind Wandering Using Monaural Beat Stimulation in Subjects With High Trait-Level Mind Wandering

“…Generally, it was found that experience sampling-based MW reports not only reflect MW traits, but also individual tendencies to mind wander during specific tasks ( Rummel et al, 2021 ). Moreover, questionnaire-based MW data most likely to a larger extent depend on self-reflection and insight than experience sampling-based reports do ( Hurlburt et al, 2022 ). Thus, one may expect that questionnaire-based MW scores and MW propensities measured during the SART do not perfectly map onto one another.…”