FIGURE 1.

Changes in the frequency of citations across the ten years prior to 2013. It is apparent that the term mind wandering has seen a rapid increase in the frequency of papers using this term over this period. By contrast, some research that uses other, related terms has remained at a relatively consistent level over the same period. The x-axis describes the year the paper was published. The y-axis describes the number of papers published in each year that have the term in the title, abstract, or keywords. Different colored lines describe the different terms used to describe self-generated mental activity.