Thomas Metzinger’s (2013) view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency.

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Introspective evidence suggests that the different forms that the mind-wandering experience can take are limited primarily by the scope of an individual’s imagination...Mind-wandering episodes contain both strategic/deliberate and spontaneous/unintentional elements.

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Nevertheless, this definition abstracts away from a central feature of mindwandering, namely, its dynamics. Wandering trains of thought unfold in a distinctive way over time. Irving (2016) notes that the term “mind-wandering” reflects these dynamics: according to the Oxford English Dictionary (online), “to wander” means “to move hither and thither without fixed course or certain aim.” The preceding definition of mind-wandering, however, focuses only on individual mental states and seeks to determine whether their content is related to one’s task or environment.This focus tells us nothing about how trains of thought unfold over time. As we now argue, this definition of mind-wandering in static terms is unsatisfactory in two ways: it cannot differentiate between mind-wandering and other kinds of task-unrelated and stimulus-independent thought; and it cannot account for the fact that mindwandering can be task-related...In general, whereas rumination remains fixed on a single topic, mind-wandering drifts from one topic to the next. One has not wandered—“moved hither and thither”—if one has stayed on a single spot.$

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Mind-wandering refers to the occurrence of thoughts whose content is both decoupled from stimuli present in the current environment and unrelated to the task being carried out at the moment of their occurrence...The core of this phenomenon is therefore stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thoughts (SITUTs)...Most mind-wandering episodes are oriented toward the future...Mind-wandering and external distractions similarly impair task performance.

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To distinguish mind-wandering from goal-directed thought, we could maintain that all mind-wandering is task-unrelated thought. We define mindwandering as unguided thinking.

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Peter Carruthers’s (2015) and Fabian Dorsch’s (2015) definitions of mind-wandering as disunified thinking.

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Scientists in the empirical literature typically define mind-wandering as thought that is “task-unrelated” or “stimulus-independent,” or both. For example, Smallwood and Schooler define mind-wandering as “a shift in the contents of thought away from an ongoing task and/or from events in the external environment to self-generated thoughts and feelings”. This definition correctly identifies paradigm cases of mind-wandering.

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Although the phrase “spontaneous thought” is often equated with “mind-wandering” throughout the literature, we recently proposed that mind-wandering is but one member of a larger class of spontaneous processes that also includes nighttime dreaming, as well as aspects of creativity.
For years, mindwandering has been defined as being either unrelated to the task at hand (as a task-unrelated thought) or as independent from external stimuli (as a stimulus-independent thought). While more recent taxonomies suggest that true episodes of mind-wandering are thoughts that are both task-unrelated and stimulus-independent, such definitions do not consider the manner in which thoughts are evoked, nor how they unfold over time.

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“Constructive, internal reflection.“

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