Multidimensional Experience Sampling (MDES)
The mind-wandering field’s instrument for asking what the mind was doing, not merely whether it was off task. Developed largely in Jonathan Smallwood’s programme (Smallwood et al. 2016, 2021; Ruby et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2018; Martinon et al. 2019), it presents a fixed battery of statements about ongoing thought and treats the resulting profile as a multidimensional description to be factor-analysed rather than a score.
The wiki meets it through Banellis et al. (2026), where it arrives already modified: eight interoceptive and somatomotor probes bolted onto the standard fourteen.
The battery, and what the extension added
The 14 classical items cover temporal orientation (past, future, temporal distance), reference (self, other), affect (positive, negative), form (words, images, vivid, vague/detailed, repetitive), and control (spontaneous–deliberate, focus).
The eight added items are: body, breath, heart, movement, bladder, skin, stomach, plus arousal (sleepy–alert). Each identically phrased — “My thoughts were about my ___” — and identically scaled.
That symmetry is the design’s argument. Because the new items sit in the same battery on the same scale in randomized order, the body probes and the cognitive probes are directly comparable, and questions like “is body content more or less prevalent than temporal content?” become answerable arithmetic (median 36.3 vs 47) rather than a comparison across instruments.
Why it matters to this wiki
MDES is the wiki’s first method that measures spontaneous interoceptive attention. Every other self-report instrument here asks about interoception in a framed way: MAIA asks how you generally relate to bodily sensation, the property-association-task asks what you take an emotion to involve, EMA asks what you are feeling right now. MDES asks what the mind drifted to when nothing was asked of it — which is a different quantity, and the only one of the four that can find out how often the body shows up unbidden.
It is also, straightforwardly, a sensibility instrument in taxonomy terms. Nothing is detected; nothing is scored against ground truth. What it measures well is disposition, and the wiki should not let its impressive reliability be read as accuracy.
Relation to EMA
ESM and MDES are cousins that trade in opposite directions. EMA signals people in ordinary life and buys ecological validity at the cost of experimental control and of any concurrent brain measure. MDES probes in the lab — often inside a scanner — and buys a controlled, instrumented, physiologically-monitored state at the cost of that ecological validity, which in Banellis et al.’s case is a peculiar bodily state indeed (supine, motionless, in a tube). Neither is more real; they answer different questions, and the body-wandering result is a lab finding awaiting an EMA replication the authors explicitly call for.