The impact of the weekly cycle on conscious experience in daily life Data and Scripts

Data and scripts for Wallace et al., 2025 [pre-print] for reproducibility. In this repository, you will find data files and analysis scripts to interrogate the relationship between day of the week and times of the day on experiences in daily life.

Our analysis aimed to establish the types of experiences reported in daily-life using samples from two different countries (Canada and the UK) in student and general population age groups. Participants responded to probes about their experiences by answering questions about the dimensions of their thoughts using multi-dimensional experience sampling (mDES) multiple times a day across the week. Our results reveal across our entire sample, as well as our country and age-group analyses, reveal 3 components of thought associated with experiences. Using these data, we empirically assess if the weekly cycle has an impact on conscious experiences and how these experiences relate to our daily activities.

We establish two main findings from our results. First, participants thoughts become more task problem-focused, deliberate, and detailed (i.e. Detail Task-Focus) throughout the day, which is specific to weekdays rather than weekends. This thought pattern was most present when individuals reported working or studying and negatively associated with talking in person. On the other hand, experiences involving more intrusive and distracting features are most prevalent in passive states (resting or doing nothing), neither of which vary with the weekly cycle.

The raw mDES dataset and the full dataset, with the PCA components used in the manuscript, are available. In addition, demographic details and predictor variables (time of day, day of week, activities) are also included in these files.