 Ericsson and Simon (1984/1993; Ericsson 2003) discuss and review relationships between the participant’s performance on various problem-solving tasks, their concurrent verbalizations of conscious thoughts (“think aloud protocols”), and their immediately retrospective verbalizations. The existence of good relationships in the predicted directions in many problem-solving tasks lends empirical support to the view that people’s reports about their stream of thoughts often accurately reflect those thoughts. For example, Ericsson and Simon find that think-aloud and retrospective reports of thought processes correlate with predicted patterns of eye movement and response latency. Ericsson and Simon also cite studies like that of Hamilton and Sanford (1978), who asked participants to make yes or no judgments about whether pairs of letters were in alphabetical order (like MO) or not (like RP) and then to describe retrospectively their method for arriving at the judgments. When participants retrospectively reported knowing the answer “automatically” without an intervening conscious process, reaction times were swift and did not depend on the distance between the letters. When participants retrospectively reported “running through” a sequential series of letters (such as “LMNO” when prompted with “MO”) reaction times correlated nicely with reported length of run-through. On the other hand, Flavell, Green, and Flavell (1995) report gross and widespread introspective error about recently past and even current (conscious) thought in young children; and Smallwood and Schooler (2006) review literature that suggests that people are not especially good at detecting when their mind is wandering.