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In two experiments, subjects responded to on-task probes while reading under dual-task conditions. The secondary task was to monitor the text for occurrences of the letter e. In Experiment 1, reading comprehension was assessed with a multiple-choice recognition test; in Experiment 2, subjects recalled the text. In both experiments, the secondary ta...
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Prior neuroimaging studies of discourse comprehension and strategic reading comprehension have shown that there are at least two networks of brain regions that support strategic discourse comprehension. In particular, strategic reading comprehension leads to activation of a domain-general control network as well as a network of regions supporting c...
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... Specifically, they argued that as the cognitive load manipulation usually requires performing an additional, relatively demanding task, and, crucially, as participants in the low load condition do not have to spend time performing the second task, the differences in the number of reported thoughts between conditions may reflect a cumulative effect of both presumed cognitive load dependency and those differences between conditions. However, using a dual task method to increase cognitive load of an ongoing task is a fairly standard procedure that has been often used in different fields of cognitive psychology (e.g., Ball, 2007;Dixon & Li, 2013;Harrison et al., 2014;Guynn & McDaniel, 2007). Moreover, in the present study the additional task of monitoring the colour of a square occurred in the same (visual) modality and importantly, squares were presented in the center of the screen rather than in the periphery, which reduced the necessity for switching attention between stimuli in the high cognitive load condition. ...
The present study focused on involuntary thoughts about personal past events (i.e., involuntary autobiographical memories; IAMs), and involuntary thoughts about future events and plans (i.e., involuntary future thoughts; IFTs). The frequency of these involuntary thoughts is influenced by cognitive demands of ongoing activities, but the exact underlying mechanism(s) has yet to be revealed. The present study tested two possible explanations: (1) the special inhibitory mechanism switches on when one is engaged in attentionally demanding activities; (2) different levels of cognitive load interfere with cue-noticing that act as triggers for IAMs and IFTs. We report a study with pre-selected groups of participants that differed in terms of their individual level of inhibitory control capacity (high vs. low), and completed both standard and attentionally demanding versions of a laboratory vigilance task with irrelevant cue-words to trigger IAMs and IFTs, and random thought-probes to measure their frequency. To examine the level of incidental cue-noticing, participants also completed an unexpected cue-recognition task. Despite large differences between groups in inhibitory control capacity, the number of IFTs and IAMs, reported in the attentionally demanding condition, was comparable. In addition, high cognitive load reduced the number of IAMs, but not IFTs. Finally, the recognition of incidental cues encountered in the vigilance task was reduced under high cognitive load condition, indicating that poor cue-noticing may be the main underlying mechanism of cognitive load effect rather than the lack of inhibitory resources needed to suppress involuntary retrieval. This and other possible mechanisms and avenues for future research are discussed.
... Cependant, même si ce phénomène disposerait d'une utilité concrète, son émergence entraîne un découplage dans notre perception du monde réel (Baird et al., 2014;. Ce découplage perceptif est la cause de nombreux inconvénients pour le système cognitif, comme en témoignent les erreurs d'inattention qui se multiplient (Christoff et al., 2009;, de même que les erreurs de compréhension (Dixon & Li, 2013;Smallwood, 2011;. Ces disruptions du traitement des stimuli externes auront alors des conséquences importantes pour leur mémorisation, ce qui sera reflété par des liens négatifs entre taux de mind wandering et performances mnésiques. ...
L'attention et la mémoire épisodique sont deux processus connus pour être particulièrement liés et dont les interactions ont été largement décrites dans la littérature. Le mind wandering (ou errance mentale/vagabondage de l'esprit) est un phénomène de plus en plus décrit, qui correspond aux fluctuations entre un focus attentionnel porté sur une tâche ou des stimuli externes vers des pensées et stimuli internes. Ce phénomène est extrêmement répandu, certaines études estimant qu'il occuperait jusqu'à 45% de nos activités mentales. Il serait associé à un découplage perceptif entraînant un moindre traitement des stimuli externes au profit de ceux internes. Ce traitement détérioré des informations de l'environnement impacte négativement différents processus, dont l'un des plus notables est l'encodage en mémoire épisodique. La mémoire épisodique, correspondant au rappel des informations personnellement vécues, associé à un sentiment de reviviscence et un rappel du contexte spatio-temporel, est extrêmement impactée par l'attention allouée lors de l'encodage. Or, relativement peu d'études ont testé ce lien entre mind wandering et mémoire épisodique, et les mesures ainsi que les statistiques effectuées pour lier ces deux phénomènes sont assez simplistes (corrélations globales), dans des contextes peu écologiques (paradigmes en laboratoire), et reposent sur des mesures peu précises (catégorisation des pensées en mind wandering/non mind wandering ou scores mnésiques très simples). Ainsi, compte tenu des liens très documentés entre attention et mémoire, couplé au peu d'études testant les relations entre mind wandering et mémoire épisodique, et aux mesures assez sommaires utilisées pour les étudier, le but de la présente thèse est d'étendre et de compléter les travaux déjà réalisés en investiguant la relation entre mind wandering et mémoire épisodique via différentes méthodes telles que la réalité virtuelle ou l'emploi de mesures physiologiques.
... The conclusion that task-and person-characteristics are important determinants of mind wandering and its effect on task performance has implications for researchers who tend toward a one-size-fits-all approach to inducing mind wandering in laboratory settings (e.g., Dixon & Li, 2013;Forster & Lavie, 2009). Moreover, it implies that in applied settings, mind wandering interventions should address individual and task characteristics in order to be effective. ...
... sustained attention, visual search, reading, or watching lectures), higher rates of mind wandering are often associated with greater detriments to performance (e.g. slower reaction times, greater errors, poorer memory retention; Dixon & Li, 2013;Forster & Lavie, 2009;McVay & Kane, 2009;Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008;Varao Sousa, Carriere, & Smilek, 2013). Similarly, distractions have been reported to negatively impact performance (e.g. ...
... The divergence between life and lab is also supported by a recent study by Unsworth and McMillan (2017) in which participants completed in-lab cognitive ability tests and then, for one week, reported mind wandering and distractions that took place while studying or while in class. In contrast to laboratory studies showing that mind wandering and distraction negatively influence performance (Banbury & Berry, 1998;Dixon & Li, 2013;Forster & Lavie, 2007;Forster & Lavie, 2009;McVay & Kane, 2009;Reinten et al., 2017;Smallwood et al., 2008;Varao Sousa et al., 2013), their results suggest that everyday reports of mind wandering and distraction were not correlated with in-lab cognitive ability measures or with academic performance. However, it is worth noting that there were exceptions in Unsworth and McMillan (2017), such that some categories of mind wandering and distraction did correlate with in-lab measures (e.g. ...
Abstract The present study examined the impact that the environment has on the ability to remain attentive and retain information. Participants listened to an audiobook in either a controlled lab setting or in an uncontrolled natural setting. While listening to the audiobook, participants were randomly prompted to report their current attentional status (focused, mind wandering, or distracted). Participants performed a memory test on audiobook content at the end. Inattention (mind wandering and distraction) did not differ between the two settings. However, there was a setting by attentional state interaction: distraction rates were higher than mind wandering rates outside the lab, while inattention rates did not differ inside the lab. Memory test performance was poorer outside the lab, suggesting that increased distraction may compromise memory more than mind wandering. Collectively, the data suggest that mind wandering and distraction are distinct types of attentional failures and that past controlled lab investigations may have overestimated the role of mind wandering and underestimated the role of distraction in everyday cognition.
... Contrary to our expectations, we did not observe a negative association between literacy-related skills and selfperceived tendency to mind wander. As to text comprehension, in particular, present results may seem to contradict evidences that have extensively documented the negative influence of MW on text comprehension performance (Broadway, Franklin, & Schooler, 2015;Dixon & Li, 2013;Feng et al., 2013;Jackson & Balota, 2012;Krawietz, Tamplin, & Radvansky, 2012;Smallwood et al., 2008;Unsworth & McMillan, 2013). It has to be noted, however, that in one study the negative effects of MW on text comprehension were evident only for difficult texts (i.e., with recurrent low-frequency words and complex sentence structures) (Feng et al., 2013). ...
Background. Mind wandering has commonly been linked to bad scholastic performance; however, such association has rarely been investigated in the classroom. Moreover, in examining such association, motivational variables have been largely ignored.
Aim. We aimed at examining the associations between the dispositional tendency to engage in mind wandering and a series of reading comprehension skills and measures of academic self-concept above and beyond the role of sex, age, test anxiety, self-efficacy and self-regulation strategies.
Sample. Late adolescents (N = 272, 133 females; 17.23 ± 1.10 years) recruited from 15 classes in public high schools.
Methods. Students were examined in their classroom during regular teaching activities and first performed a reading comprehension test. Then, they underwent a battery assessing literacy skills, academic self-concept, the dispositional tendency to mind wander, and aspects related to self-regulated learning.
Results. Reading comprehension and literacy skills (decoding, orthographic awareness, spelling skills, and phonological abilities) were not associated with the tendency to mind wander. Instead, mind wandering, test anxiety and self-efficacy –but not self-regulatory strategies- were independent predictors of academic self-concept.
Conclusions. The present study highlights the importance of evaluating the effects of mind wandering on academic self-concept, taking into account a complex pattern of motivational and emotional variables.
... This finding contributes to a growing set of factors that affects re-reading in reading comprehension, including conceptual difficulty , comprehension demand (Weiss et al., 2017), language proficiency (Reichle et al., 2013), font difficulty (Rayner, Reichle, Stroud, Williams, & Pollatsek, 2006), etc. Due to extensive re-reading, we did not find readers' comprehension scores to be significantly impaired by music. Dixon & Li (2013) proposed that skilled readers infer the amount of attentional resources allocated to reading comprehension by examining the richness of situational model in their working memory. An impoverished situational model could lead to the inference that attention is distracted by music, triggering rereading behaviors. ...
The current research looked at how listening to music affects eye movements when college students read natural passages for comprehension. Two studies found that effects of music depend on both frequency of the word and dynamics of the music. Study 1 showed that lexical and linguistic features of the text remained highly robust predictors of looking times, even in the music condition. However, under music exposure, (a) readers produced more rereading, and (b) gaze duration on words with very low frequency were less predicted by word length, suggesting disrupted sublexical processing. Study 2 showed that these effects were exacerbated for a short period as soon as a new song came into play. Our results suggested that word recognition generally stayed on track despite music exposure and that extensive rereading can, to some extent, compensate for disruption. However, an irrelevant auditory signal may impair sublexical processing of low-frequency words during first-pass reading, especially when the auditory signal changes dramatically. These eye movement patterns are different from those observed in some other scenarios in which reading comprehension is impaired, including mindless reading.
... It is possible that the opposite is true, such that a lack of understanding of lecture content (which would lead to poorer memory) caused the students to make an inference about their degree of mind wandering (see Mrazek et al., 2012 for a detailed exploration of the causal chain). Indeed, recent data suggest that participants may sometimes base their thought-probe responses on either their current level of interest (Dixon & Bortolussi, 2013), or on some appraisal of the contents of their working memory (Dixon & Li, 2013). The relation between mind wandering and performance is complex, and future work will be needed to test this possibility. ...
General Audience Summary
Research has shown that the longer people are asked to complete basic sustained attention tasks, the more likely they are to experience lapses in attention, often in the form of mind wandering. This increase in mind wandering over time also tends to occur during video lectures. However, studies testing whether this occurs during actual live undergraduate lectures are scarce. In Study 1, we found that students in an actual live undergraduate course did not show an increase in the degree to which they were mind wandering over the duration of an average lecture. However, when students’ mind wandering did fluctuate in degree, their learning of the presented lecture material correspondingly fluctuated, such that as degree of mind wandering increased, learning decreased. In Study 2 we showed that in contrast to those who viewed a lecture live, students who viewed the exact same lecture in video format demonstrated a consistent increase in degree of mind wandering over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that when applied to the real world, increases in mind-wandering over time in lectures are not as apparent as they have been in previous research, and that lecture format is an important determinant of attention maintenance. Many universities and educational institutions are moving toward providing online video lecture content rather than live lectures. Administrators should be aware that there may be consequences to this choice in terms of student attention span.
... It is possible that the opposite is true, such that a lack of understanding of lecture content (which would lead to poorer memory) caused the students to make an inference about their degree of mind wandering (see Mrazek et al., 2012 for a detailed exploration of the causal chain). Indeed, recent data suggest that participants may sometimes base their thought-probe responses on either their current level of interest (Dixon & Bortolussi, 2013), or on some appraisal of the contents of their working memory (Dixon & Li, 2013). The relation between mind wandering and performance is complex, and future work will be needed to test this possibility. ...
We examined mind wandering and memory for information in both live undergraduate lectures and a laboratory-based video lecture. In Study 1, which spanned a full-term live course, we found that degree of mind wandering did not increase over time in an average lecture, and was associated with poorer memory for lecture material. In Study 2, we examined changes in degree of mind wandering across three groups that differed in whether they viewed the lecture in video-recorded or live format, and whether or not they were enrolled in the course. We found that despite viewing the exact same lecture, participants who viewed it in video format showed a significant increase in mind wandering over the duration of the lecture, while those who viewed it live did not. This finding suggests that video, relative to live lectures are especially likely to elicit increases in mind wandering over the duration of a lecture.
... Although this is clearly better than chance, it leaves many episodes incorrectly classified. Thus, in the present research we used a variation of the probe technique developed by Dixon and Li (2013) in which participants rate their on-task focus on a continuous scale. We argue that this approach is valuable because readers may devote resources to the task of reading to a greater or lesser extent and a continuous scale may be able to capture relatively subtle variations in such resource allocation (cf. ...
In the present research, we attempted to manipulate non-contingent processing in reading - that is, mental activities that are not dependent on processing the words of the text. An important class of non-contingent processing is mind wandering, but non-contingent processing may include other, task-related activities as well. In our study, participants read stories sentence by sentence, and we manipulated the interval between sentences. In the immediate condition, there was no delay; in the constant-delay condition, there was a 2-s delay before the next sentence; and in the random-delay condition, the delay was randomly either 0 or 2 s. Participants read a story in each of these conditions. Periodically while reading each story, participants were interrupted and asked to rate whether they were on task. Although delay had little overall effect, it moderated the relationship between on-task rating and recall: In the two delay conditions, recall increased with on-task rating, but there was no such effect in the immediate condition. This pattern of results suggests that introducing the delay increased non-contingent processing, but that the nature of that processing varied. For example, in some cases, the delay may have increased mind wandering, leading to poorer recall; in other cases, the delay may have increased elaboration and reflection concerning the story world, leading to increased recall.
... Mind wandering varies with the interest value of the text but is still common for compelling and engaging texts ; see also Unsworth and McMillan 2013). As one might suspect, mind wandering has an important effect on memory for the text (Schooler et al. 2004;Dixon and Li 2013), reconstruction of the text during recall , and inferences from the text (Smallwood et al. 2008). ...
An implicit supposition in literary studies is that ideal readers have unconstrained access to the text. However, we argue instead that the processing of literary narrative must be mediated by the fragmentary and distorted memory of real readers. In the present chapter, we focus on an important determinant of memory: the variation in readers’ mental states during reading. In particular, we identify two prevalent fluctuations that have critical implications for memory and literary appreciation: mind wandering, in which the reader momentarily gives relatively little priority to processing the text; and engagement, in which the reader constructs elaborate and personally meaningful representations of the story world. We describe how the variation in these mental states over the course of reading affects reading processes and determines memory for both text and aesthetic reactions. This analysis is supported by the results of two experiments in which readers’ mental states were probed online during reading.
