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Aging and Mind Wandering During Text Comprehension
Sabine A. Krawietz, Andrea K. Tamplin, and Gabriel A. Radvansky
University of Notre Dame
Mind wandering occurs when a person’s stream of thought moves from the primary task to
task-unrelated matters. Some theories of mind wandering suggest that it is caused by decreased
attentional control associated with lower working memory (WM) capacity. Others suggest that it is
caused by attention being directed toward internally generated thoughts and that it is associated with
higher WM capacity. These ideas were assessed testing older adults because they have been argued
to have reduced attentional control and lower WM capacity. The first account predicts that mind
wandering should increase in older adults, while the second account predicts the opposite. Two
experiments show that older adults exhibited a lower rate of mind wandering than younger adults.
However, when using text interest as a covariate, the age difference in mind wandering disappeared.
These results are further addressed in light of participants’ current concerns and preserved situation
model processing in cognitive aging.
Keywords: aging, mind wandering, comprehension, executive control, decoupling hypothesis
Mind wandering, also called zoning out, daydreaming, or task-
unrelated, intruding, or stimulus-independent thought, refers to a
lapse in attentional awareness, or a decoupling of attention, away
from one’s primary or external task, and toward more internally
generated thoughts and ideas (Barron, Riby, Greer, & Smallwood,
2011; Giambra, 1995; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). This shift
takes attention away toward a goal unrelated to the task at hand,
and is often initiated without complete (if any) awareness
(Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004) or intention (Giambra,
1995). That is, attention gets diverted from task-related to task-
unrelated information and people often fail to catch their minds
wandering, until after some time has elapsed. Examples of every-
day mind wandering include reaching the end of a page while
reading a book and having no idea what one just read, or thinking
about what one needs to pack for an upcoming trip while listening
to a podcast. Recently, mind wandering has been associated with
activation in the default mode network (e.g., Buckner, Andrews-
Hanna, & Schacter, 2008; Weissman, Roberts, Visscher, &
Woldorff, 2006), which is active during periods of rest or inter-
nally guided thought (i.e., mind wandering) and deactivated during
active states of task performance (Mason et al., 2007).
Mind wandering and aging has been investigated with some
research suggesting that older adults mind wander less than
younger adults (Carriere, Cheyne, Solman, & Smilek, 2010; Gi-
ambra, 1977, 1979, 1989; Smallwood et al., 2004) while other
research found no age differences (Einstein & McDaniel, 1997;
Giambra & Arenberg, 1993). In studies involving retrospective
questionnaires (Giambra, 1977, 1979) and others using thought
probes during ongoing tasks (Giambra, 1989, 1993), older adults
were found to mind wander less. Conversely, in another study,
older adults mind wandered as much as younger adults (Einstein &
McDaniel, 1997). Giambra (1989) found that mind wandering
declined with age and attributed this finding to increased age being
associated with reduced unconscious information processing.
However, this study used retrospective reports during an ongoing
vigilance task that is open to a number of potential confounds such
as self-awareness, social desirability, and memory. In another
study, Einstein and McDaniel (1997) stopped people during an
ongoing word list task and used their memory for recent words as
a measure of mind wandering. No age differences in word list
performance were found using this rather indirect measure of mind
wandering.
Our interest was in how aging impacts the tendency to mind
wander during reading. There are two alternative accounts of how
working memory (WM) might impact mind wandering. One view
of mind wandering is that the rate of mind wandering is meaning-
fully related to the degree of attentional or executive control, such
as one’s ability to inhibit task-unrelated thought (Hasher & Zacks,
1988; Kane et al., 2007; McVay, & Kane, 2011, 2009). Compared
with younger adults, older adults have less efficient attention
regulation (Braver & West, 2008; Hasher & Zacks, 1988), allow-
ing for more irrelevant thoughts to enter WM, thereby increasing
the probability that mind wandering will occur. Furthermore, re-
duced cognitive control has been predicted by lower working
memory capacity (WMC) scores that are associated with higher
mind wandering rates (McVay & Kane, 2011, 2009). During an
extensive study, using a large sample, multiple measures of WMC,
and a latent variable approach, McVay and Kane (2011) found that
people who score lower on WM span tests are more likely to
experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and are less able to
sustain attention to the demands of an ongoing task. Older adults
are less efficient at controlling their attention (Braver & West,
This article was published Online First June 11, 2012.
Sabine A. Krawietz, Andrea K. Tamplin, and Gabriel A. Radvansky,
Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame.
We thank Daniel Blakely, Megan Cefferillo, Stephen Chronister, Jessica
Harrison, Patrick Loughery, and Sean Wong for their assistance in collect-
ing and coding data.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sabine A.
Krawietz, 254 Haggar Hall, Department of Psychology, University of
Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556. E-mail: skrawiet@nd.edu
Psychology and Aging © 2012 American Psychological Association
2012, Vol. 27, No. 4, 951–958 0882-7974/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0028831
951
2008; Hasher & Zacks, 1988); thus, mind wandering may occur
more frequently in older than in younger adults. As such, the
prediction from the executive control view is that older adults
should mind wander more.
The other view, called the decoupling hypothesis, suggests that
people with greater WMC are more likely to fall prey to mind
wandering than people with lower WMC (Smallwood, Brown,
Baird, & Schooler, 2011; Smallwood et al., 2004; Smallwood &
Schooler, 2006). As compared with lower WMC people, people
with greater capacities have more resources left when accomplish-
ing the same task that are not needed for the primary task and are
free to be used for other tasks. From this view, attention is
decoupled from the task at hand and moved to secondary lines of
thought when the primary task is not perceived as being engaging
and/or the individual is bothered by unresolved goals (Smallwood
& Schooler, 2006) or current concerns (Klinger, 1971, 1999;
McVay & Kane, 2010).
Support for the decoupling hypothesis has been found during
performance on an oddball task using event-related potentials
(ERPs) in which mind wandering was associated with a reduction
(not an absence) in the orienting and the processing response of
target and distractor stimuli (Barron et al., 2011). This finding
supports the notion that, during mind wandering, attention is
coupled to internally generated thought and decoupled from ex-
ternal stimuli. Thus, it is unlikely that people are simply distracted,
not processing external stimuli at all, or that they experience
deficits in the processing of task-relevant information. A ubiqui-
tous finding in the cognitive aging research is that older adults
score lower on measures of WMC than younger adults (e.g.,
Salthouse & Babcock, 1991). Older adults have less available
WMC to dedicate to a task and so are less likely to have residual
capacity left to allow mind wandering to occur. As such, the
prediction from the decoupling hypothesis is that older adults
should mind wander less than younger adults.
However, WM may not be the only factor contributing to mind
wandering during reading. Mind wandering may also be influ-
enced by processing at the situation model level (Smallwood,
McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008). Briefly, situation model process-
ing involves creating representations of the core elements of a
situation (e.g., the social relations of the characters in a story) in
comparison to processing at the surface form and textbase levels,
which involve a representation of the text itself such as its word-
ing, syntax, and lexical semantics (e.g., Morrow, Greenspan, &
Bower, 1987; Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995). Active pro-
cessing at the situation model level may help people stay more
engaged with the text because they would be more engaged in
processing information concerning what the text is about and,
thereby, decrease the likelihood of subsequent mind wandering
(Smallwood et al., 2008).
Research has shown that the level of TUT may be associated
with how interesting and difficult people find the text they read
(Grodsky & Giambra, 1990; McVay & Kane, 2009; Smallwood,
Nind, & O’Connor, 2009); that is, interesting tasks engage atten-
tion more fully compared with boring tasks. Moreover, previous
work has shown that older adults do as well as, if not better than,
younger adults at comprehending and remembering text on a
situation model level as opposed to surface form or textbase levels
(Radvansky, Zwaan, Curiel, & Copeland, 2001; Radvansky &
Dijkstra, 2007; Radvansky, 1999). Thus, they may rely more
heavily on situation model processing when reading text (Stine-
Morrow, Morrow, & Leno, 2002). If older adults are more engaged
in processing at the situation model level, then they may mind
wander less often than younger adults.
The aim of the current study is to further assess how mind
wandering is affected by the aging process using a text compre-
hension task. More specifically, we test how mind wandering may
be affected by age-related changes in attention control (e.g.,
McVay & Kane, 2011, 2009), WMC (e.g., Smallwood & Schooler,
2006), and situation model processing (e.g., Radvansky & Dijks-
tra, 2007).
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 tested the accuracy of the two WM accounts by
comparing mind wandering in reading between younger and older
adults who are known to differ in WM capacity and attentional
control ability. Younger adults typically outscore older adults on
measures of WM capacity and attentional control (Hasher &
Zacks, 1988; Salthouse & Babcock, 1991). If mind wandering is
driven by residual attentional resources (e.g., Smallwood &
Schooler, 2006), then older adults, who have a lower WM capacity
than younger adults, will mind wander less. This hypothesis is
supported by older adults relying more heavily on situation model
processing than younger adults (e.g., Stine-Morrow et al., 2002).
Compared with surface form and textbase level processing, which
is predominantly used by younger adults, situation model process-
ing helps the reader to stay engaged with the text (Smallwood et
al., 2008) and, thus, may lead to less mind wandering. Conversely,
if mind wandering can be explained by inferior executive control
(e.g., McVay & Kane, 2009), then older adults, who have lower
attentional control than younger adults, will mind wander more.
Method
Participants. Seventy-eight younger adults were recruited
from the University of Notre Dame subject pool and given partial
course credit for their participation (age range 18 –22 years; M ⫽
19.05, SD ⫽ 1.26). Two of these had read the text before and were
dropped from the analyses. Thus, 76 adults (48 women) comprised
the final young adults group. In addition, 26 participants com-
prised the older group and came from a local senior center (age
range 58 – 87 years; M ⫽ 75.1, SD ⫽ 6.7). Only data from older
participants with a score of 25 or higher on the Mini-Mental State
Exam (MMSE; Folstein, Folstein, & McHugh, 1975) were ana-
lyzed. The data from three participants did not reach this criterion
and were excluded from the analyses, yielding a sample size of 23
(14 women) older adults. None of them reported having read the
text before and all of them were given $20 for participating. All
participants had normal or corrected to normal vision and were
native English speakers. The experimental procedure lasted, on
average, 1 hr.
Younger adults scored higher than the older adults on a reading
span task (Waters, Caplan, & Hildebrandt, 1987), F(1, 80) ⫽
14.09, MSE ⫽ 192.50, p ⬍ .001, a complex verbal WM measure
involving sentence sensibility judgments and the remembering of
the final word of each sentence. The sentences are presented in
952
KRAWIETZ, TAMPLIN, AND RADVANSKY
increasingly longer sequences ranging from two to seven sen-
tences. On the Shipley vocabulary test (Shipley, 1946), older
adults scored higher than younger adults F(1, 95) ⫽ 45.43, MSE ⫽
9.75, p ⬍ .001.
Materials and procedure. After the experimenter obtained
informed consent from the participant, the experiment was admin-
istered individually on a computer in a small room. Specifically,
people read through the text, completed the brief survey and,
finally, the two cognitive ability measures.
For the reading portion of the study, the text and thought probes
were adopted from a study by Schooler and his colleagues (2004).
People read through the first five chapters of War and Peace
(Tolstoy, 1869/1982), one sentence at a time on a computer screen.
People proceeded through the text by clicking a “Next” button
located at the bottom of the page. Prior research has shown that
text presentation mode (sentence-by-sentence vs. paragraph-by-
paragraph) has little to no effect on the rate of mind wandering
episodes during reading comprehension (Schooler et al., 2004).
We chose the sentence-by-sentence presentation mode to obtain
sentence reading times.
People periodically received probes about whether they were
mind wandering. These probes appeared intermittently, replacing
the text window with the mind wandering probe window. During
the probe, people indicated whether they were mind wandering at
that time (i.e., “Are you mind wandering?”) by clicking either a
“Yes” or a “No” button. The frequency and timing of these probes
was the same as in Schooler et al. (2004), namely every 2– 4 min
for the duration of the reading task. As such, the number of mind
wandering probes varied across people and was dependent on the
overall time taken to read the text.
If people indicated that they had been mind wandering, they
were given two follow-up questions. Following Schooler et al.
(2004), these questions were: “What were you mind wandering
about?” including the multiple answer choices sensory state, your-
self, school-related, text-related, fantasies, singing a song, wor-
ries, sleepy, tired, no thoughts, and none of the above, and “How
long were you mind wandering?” with the options ⬍5, ⬍10, ⬍20,
and ⬎21 s. Regardless of whether they indicated that they had
been mind wandering or not, people were given a recognition item
consisting of a true/false question (“Have you seen this phrase
before?”) with either an exact phrase of one of the previously read
four sentences (i.e., positive probe) or a slight variation thereof
(i.e., negative probe). Negative probes were generated by taking an
actual sentence from the text (e.g., “They say she is amazingly
beautiful.”) and altering it to convey a different meaning (e.g.,
“They say she is rather dull.”) and, thus, easy to answer if one had
been paying attention while relatively difficult to catch if one had
been mind wandering. Even though verbatim texts were the pos-
itive items, it is unlikely that subjects would reject these because
of misremembered surface form. Rather, this probe form is a good
approximation to a situation discrimination index because it as-
sesses whether participants were representing the situation sug-
gested by the text.
Finally, we composed a brief survey that was administered after
people completed the reading task. The survey included questions
on how interesting and difficult they found the text. We also
assessed whether participants recognized or had read the text
before to exclude those that did from further analyses.
After all thought probe measurement was completed, we as-
sessed cognitive ability and administered the vocabulary and read-
ing span test (see Participants section for results). Assistance in
using a computer was provided for four people in the older adult
group.
Results
Thought probes. Means and SDs for all measures are re-
ported in Table 1. Importantly, older adults reported a significantly
lower rate of mind wandering (i.e., probe caught ratio) than
younger adults, F(1, 97) ⫽ 5.44, MSE ⫽ .115, p ⫽ .02. The probe
caught ratio was computed by dividing the frequency of reported
mind wandering episodes (i.e., “Yes” responses to the mind wan-
dering probe) by the overall number of mind wandering probes
(i.e., count of mind wandering probes). Probe caught ratio was not
significantly associated with scores on the reading span for either
young or old adults (see Table 2).
Next, we examined whether mind wandering affected text com-
prehension. We submitted the recognition accuracy (ratio of cor-
rect and total number of responses to the recognition items) data to
a 2 (Age: older vs. younger adults) ⫻ 2 (Occasion: reported mind
wandering vs. not mind wandering) mixed ANOVA. Across
groups, recognition accuracy was significantly higher after report-
ing not having been mind wandering than after mind wandering,
F(1, 172) ⫽ 11.92, MSE ⫽ .487, p ⫽ .001. The main effect for age
group and the interaction were not significant, F ⬍ 1 and F(1,
172) ⫽ 1.27, MSE ⫽ .052, p ⫽ .26, respectively. Thus, accuracy
rates consistently reflect whether a person was mind wandering.
Table 1
Means and SDs (in Parentheses) of Thought Probes and Cognitive Abilities in Experiment 1
Young adults Old adults
Probe caught ratio
ⴱ
.48 (.35) .29 (.32)
Recognition accuracy when mind wandering .75 (.21) .68 (.33)
Recognition accuracy when reading attentively .84 (.17) .85 (.12)
Mean reading times
ⴱⴱ
4,524 (1,194) 7,263 (2,555)
Text interest
ⴱⴱ
2.34 (1.14) 3.43 (1.24)
Text difficulty 3.21 (.91) 3.00 (1.13)
Vocabulary score
ⴱⴱ
30.24 (3.08) 35.26 (3.25)
Reading span score
ⴱⴱ
25.54 (14.74) 11.35 (9.68)
ⴱ
p ⬍ .05.
ⴱⴱ
p ⬍ .001.
953
AGING AND MIND WANDERING
Reading times. Some research has shown that eye move-
ments change when people are mind wandering (Reichle,
Reineberg, & Schooler, 2010; Smilek, Carriere, & Cheyne, 2010).
For example, Reichle and his colleagues (2010) found that eye
fixations were longer and less affected by lexical and linguistic
variables in mind wandering as compared with attentive reading.
In contrast, mind wandering has also been associated with in-
creased eye blinking and decreased eye fixation (Smilek et al.,
2010). First, we analyzed reading times per sentence and found
that older adults read more slowly than younger adults, F(1, 96) ⫽
50.89, MSE ⫽ 2,594,461, p ⬍ .001. Then, we analyzed reading
times with respect to mind wandering by comparing the reading
times for the five sentences before each mind wandering probe
(that included the probe phrase) for reported mind wandering and
attentive reading. However, to use a more sensitive measure, we
used reading times per syllable instead of reading times per sen-
tence. Unlike prior studies, we did not find a significant difference
in these reading times between the two states or within each age
group, all Fs ⬍ 1.
Final survey. Older adults reported the text to be more
interesting, F(1, 97) ⫽ 15.65, MSE ⫽ 1.35, p ⬍ .001, but no more
difficult, F ⬍ 1, than younger adults did. Moreover, text interest
significantly correlated with probe caught ratio for younger and
older adults, while text difficulty did not (see Table 2). This
finding is consistent with a negative correlation between text
interest and mind wandering (both prospective and retrospective)
found by Smallwood and his colleagues (2009).
To further assess the influence of text interest, we ran an
analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). After controlling for interest,
there no longer was a significant effect of age on mind wandering
(i.e., probe caught ratio), F ⬍ 1. Taken together, text interest may
have contributed to the mind wandering rate because, after equat-
ing for reported text interest, older adults and younger adults
reported mind wandering at a similar rate. The implications of this
finding are further explored in the General Discussion.
Discussion
In this study, we found that older adults mind wandered at a
lower rate than younger adults. However, after controlling for
responses on the text interest survey question, the age groups no
longer differed in their mind wandering rates. Moreover, the text
was perceived as equally difficult between the two age groups and
text difficulty did not have an effect on mind wandering across
groups. Comprehension, as indicated by accuracy on the recogni-
tion test questions, was at comparable levels between the two
groups.
The data, along with the fact that the correlation between mind
wandering and WM capacity was not significant, are least consis-
tent with the executive control account that predicts that older
adults would mind wander more than younger adults. According to
the other two accounts, older adults are expected to mind wander
less than younger adults, a finding we could initially support.
However, when taking the influence of text interest into consid-
eration, the two age groups no longer showed differences in mind
wandering rates. While text interest needs to be considered more
deeply, we first sought to replicate the age difference in mind
wandering with a similar design that additionally controlled for a
factor that might be biasing the basic pattern of results, namely, the
care with which people in the two age groups read the text.
Experiment 2
One concern with the results of Experiment 1 is that the older
adults spent more time reading the text, so that it is possible that
they exerted greater effort to read carefully than did the younger
adults. That is, they may have slowed down to a pace that was
slower than their normal reading speed to allow them to better
encode the information in the text and answer the probe questions.
This slow-down in reading speed may have allowed them to mind
wander less. Even though the pace of reading among older readers
might be expected to be somewhat slower (Salthouse, 1996), our
goal was to limit excessive slowing relative to their normal rate.
Thus, we controlled individual reading speed in Experiment 2. The
basic task was the same as in Experiment 1 except that a brief text
was read before the critical one to assess individual reading speed.
We then used this assessment to control for reading speed in the
critical text to prevent readers from excessively slowing their
reading.
Method
Participants. Sixty-five participants (36 women) were re-
cruited from the University of Notre Dame subject pool and given
partial course credit for participation (age range 17–22 years; M ⫽
19.03, SD ⫽ 1.1). Three of these had read the text before and were
excluded from the analyses, leading to a sample of 63 young
adults. In addition, 23 participants (21 women) comprised the
older group and came from a local senior center (age range 62–86
years; M ⫽ 71.7, SD ⫽ 6.4) and all of them obtained a score of 25
or higher on the MMSE. The older adults were given $20 for
participating and none of them had indicated to have read the text
before. Younger adults scored higher than older adults on the
automated operation span test of WM (OSPAN; Unsworth, Heitz,
Schrock, & Engle, 2005), F(1, 82) ⫽ 84.21, MSE ⫽ 156.38, p ⬍
.001, which involves solving arithmetic problems and remember-
ing letters in the correct order presented after each problem. We
switched to the OSPAN because we wanted to use a more com-
monly used measure of WM. On the Shipley vocabulary test
(Shipley, 1946), older adults scored higher than younger adults
F(1, 80) ⫽ 14.37, MSE ⫽ 12.02, p ⬍ .001. All participants had
normal or corrected to normal vision and were native English
speakers.
Table 2
Correlation Coefficients Between Probe Caught Ratio and Text
Interest and Difficulty per Age Group for Experiments 1 and 2
Probe caught ratio WM span
a
Text interest Text difficulty
Experiment 1
Young adults ⫺.07 ⫺.45
ⴱⴱ
⫺.09
Old adults ⫺.36 ⫺.41
ⴱ
.14
Total ⫺.12 ⫺.44
ⴱⴱ
⫺.04
Experiment 2
Young adults ⫺.03 ⫺.51
ⴱⴱ
.42
ⴱⴱ
Old adults ⫺.21 ⫺.18 ⫺.36
Total ⫺.08 ⫺.43
ⴱⴱ
.22
ⴱ
a
WM span was reading span in Experiment 1 and OSPAN in Experiment 2.
ⴱ
p ⬍ .05.
ⴱⴱ
p ⬍ .001.
954
KRAWIETZ, TAMPLIN, AND RADVANSKY
Procedure. The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1,
except that we controlled for reading speed and used the OSPAN
instead of the reading span as our WM span measure. At the
beginning of testing, participants read a 52-sentence excerpt of a
different story. People were instructed to read this passage at their
normal rate. Here, people were not probed for mind wandering,
and mind wandering had not been mentioned up to that point in the
study. To compute each participant’s reading speed, we divided
each sentence’s reading time by its number of syllables and then
averaged across all reading time/number of syllable ratios. Based
on their reading speed for this passage, we were able to set a
reading speed cut-off for the critical text (i.e., War and Peace).
While reading the critical text, people still pressed a button to
advance to the next sentence; however, if they had taken longer
than their predicted time (based on their estimated reading speed),
the program automatically advanced to the next sentence.
Results
Thought probes. Means and SDs for all measures are re-
ported in Table 3. First, there were no differences in the rate of
auto advancement (the proportion of trials that was ended by the
program rather than by the participant) between the two groups,
F(1, 83) ⫽ 1.85, MSE ⫽ .01, p ⫽ .18. Importantly, the older adults
had a lower rate of mind wandering relative to the younger adults,
F(1, 83) ⫽ 5.51, MSE ⫽ .09, p ⫽ .02. Again, probe caught ratio
did not significantly correlate with scores on the OSPAN for either
young or old adults (see Table 2).
Again, we submitted the recognition accuracy data to a 2 (Age:
younger vs. older adults) ⫻ 2 (Occasion: reported mind wandering
vs. not mind wandering) mixed ANOVA. As in Experiment 1,
recognition accuracy was higher after reporting not having been
mind wandering than after mind wandering across groups, F(1,
150) ⫽ 20.25, MSE ⫽ 1.011, p ⬍ .001. Contrary to Experiment 1,
younger adults had significantly higher scores than older adults,
F(1, 172) ⫽ 11.40, MSE ⫽ .568, p ⫽ .001. As in Experiment 1, the
interaction was not significant, Fs ⬍ 1.
Reading times. Again, older adults read more slowly than
younger adults, F(1, 82) ⫽ 33.87, MSE ⫽ 3,154,243, p ⬍ .001,
when analyzing reading speed per sentence. Moreover, we did not
find significant differences in reading speed between attentive and
inattentive reading for either age group, all Fs ⬍ 1, when consid-
ering reading times per syllable in the five sentences before each
mind wandering probe. Finally, the auto-advance/reading ratio did
not significantly differ between the two age groups, F ⬍ 1.
Final survey. As in Experiment 1, older adults reported the
text to be more interesting, F(1, 80) ⫽ 6.63, MSE ⫽ 1.44, p ⫽ .01,
but not more difficult, F ⬍ 1, than younger adults. For younger
adults, we also found significant correlations between the probes
caught ratio and text interest and text difficulty; however, neither
of these was significant for older adults (see Table 2). Again, an
ANCOVA with text interest as the covariate revealed that the two
age groups no longer differed in their rate of mind wandering, F(1,
79) ⫽ 1.83, MSE ⫽ .141, p ⫽ .18.
Discussion
As in Experiment 1, after controlling for reading speed, we
found that older adults reported mind wandering less often than
younger adults. However, like in Experiment 1, using text interest
as a covariate removed this age difference. Importantly, there was
no indication that older adults were mind wandering more often
than younger adults.
General Discussion
In this study, across two experiments, we examined the rela-
tionship between mind wandering rate and aging when people
were reading narrative texts, and how this mind wandering might
be influenced by the contribution of age-related changes in WM,
attentional control, situation model processing, and text interest.
This study extends prior research that has explained mind wan-
dering in terms of executive control and the decoupling hypothesis
(Einstein & McDaniel, 1997; Giambra, 1995; Kane et al., 2007;
McVay & Kane, 2011, 2009; Smallwood et al., 2004; Smallwood
& Schooler, 2006). Across two experiments, we initially found that
the mind wandering rate of the older adults was lower than that of
the younger adults. Additionally, there was a significant associa-
tion between mind wandering and text interest with people who
mind wandered less also reporting greater interest in what they
read, consistent with work by other researchers (e.g., Giambra,
1993; Smallwood et al., 2004; Smilek et al., 2010).
In general, our data suggest that WMC still plays a driving role
in this phenomenon. When comparing the two prominent theories
of mind wandering, we find that the results of our study are more
consistent with the predictions made by the decoupling hypothesis
Table 3
Means and SDs (in Parentheses) of Thought Probes and Cognitive Abilities in Experiment 2
Young adults Old adults
Probe caught ratio
ⴱ
.48 (.31) .31 (.28)
Recognition accuracy when mind wandering .64 (.30) .67 (.26)
Recognition accuracy when reading attentively
ⴱ
.84 (.15) .76 (.08)
Mean reading times
ⴱⴱ
4,651 (1,475) 7,216 (2,450)
Auto-advance/reading time ratio .085 (.066) .113 (.124)
Text interest
ⴱ
2.15 (1.14) 2.91 (1.35)
Text difficulty 3.25 (.94) 3.09 (1.13)
Vocabulary score
ⴱⴱ
30.52 (3.43) 33.77 (3.56)
OSPAN score
ⴱⴱ
50.34 (15.86) 14.39 (16.43)
ⴱ
p ⬍ .05.
ⴱⴱ
p ⬍ .001.
955
AGING AND MIND WANDERING
(Smallwood et al., 2004; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) than those
made by the executive control account (McVay & Kane, 2011,
2009). According to the decoupling hypothesis, people with
greater WMC (i.e., here the younger adults group) would be more
likely to mind wander as compared with people with smaller
WMC (i.e., here the older adults group). For example, when
reading a text (like War & Peace), people with greater WMC may
not require all of their resources to follow the story and may have
residual resources available to engage in secondary thoughts which
can lead to mind wandering. People whose WMC is exhausted
when reading a story are less at risk for mind wandering to occur
because they cannot “afford” to engage in secondary thoughts. The
data are inconsistent with the predictions made by an executive
control view (Kane et al., 2007; McVay & Kane, 2009) because we
did not find that older adults mind wandered more than younger
adults. Finally, the presence of an age difference in mind wandering
when interest level is taken into account suggests that the prediction
made by the situation model account is incomplete at best.
One point of concern is that the WM span (reading span and
OSPAN) scores and mind wandering rates were not signifi-
cantly correlated in our experiments while other researchers
have found a negative relationship between mind wandering
and WM (e.g., McVay & Kane, 2011). However, in their study,
McVay and Kane had a large sample size (around 250 partici-
pants), an extensive battery of WM measures, and a latent
variable approach. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that
some measures of language comprehension, such as those
aimed more at the situation model level, do not always correlate
well with WM span measures (Copeland & Radvansky, 2004;
Radvansky, & Copeland, 2001, 2004). There are aspects of WM
processing that are not well measured by traditional memory
span measures. WM span scores are generally more correlated
with tasks that emphasize surface form and textbase memory,
such as word and sentence list tasks. This is not to say that
situation model processing does not rely on WM capacity. It
certainly does. For example, Noh and Stine-Morrow (2009)
found that older adults were more likely to have trouble as the
number of entities in a described situation increase.
Moreover, mind wandering has also been associated with
unresolved goals (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) or current
concerns (Klinger, 1971, 1999; McVay & Kane, 2010). Exec-
utive control and resources may influence mind wandering only
to some extent while the presence and urgency of current
concerns (i.e., automatically generated, personally related
thoughts) and the extent to which the testing context triggers
those thoughts may be additional important factors (Klinger,
1971, 1999). Consistent with this view, Carstensen (1993,
1995) suggested that younger adults may generate more inter-
fering thoughts because they are said to have more current
concerns than older adults and task goals and Parks, Klinger,
and Perlmutter (1988 –1989) indeed found such a trend. It is
possible that differences between current concerns interact with
periods of mind wandering in ways not yet determined.
It should also be noted that younger and older adults differed in
the contents and duration of the reported mind wandering episodes
(see Appendix). Older adults showed more frequent text-related
and none of the above responses while younger adults more self-
(i.e., “Yourself”) and school-related ones. This finding may shed
some light on the current concerns hypothesis in that younger
adults may think more about topics unrelated to the text at hand
than the older adults, although it is yet unclear what older adults
were mind wandering about when selecting the none of the above
response. Future research should further explore the relationship
between what people report to mind wander about and its under-
lying mechanisms.
Finally, it should be noted that older adults reported shorter mind
wandering durations (i.e., ⬍10 s) more frequently than younger adults
who in turn showed more frequent longer durations (⬎10 s). It is
unclear what this trend means. Do older adults reestablish task focus
more quickly because they are more prone to mind wander about
text-related information while younger adults think about matters
unrelated to the text, or are older adults simply more likely to report
a shorter mind wandering duration? Moreover, do these variations
reflect actual differences in duration or are they confounded with
differences in the perception of time between the two age groups?
One difference between the two experiments was that in Exper-
iment 2, older adults responded less accurately on probe items after
reporting that they were not mind wandering than younger adults.
This result suggests that older adults in Experiment 1 may have
been reading more slowly and cautiously than they normally
would. When reading speed was better regulated, the classic age
differences for surface structure memory between different age
groups emerged (e.g., Radvansky et al., 2001). Thus, this one more
peripheral difference in our findings in Experiments 1 and 2 is
probably because of other well-known age-related memory pro-
cesses and not to the attentional control issues involved with
mind-wandering during online comprehension.
In summary, our results across two experiments do not suggest
that older adults mind wander at a greater rate than younger adults
as would be expected if mind wandering was driven by a decrease
in attentional control. Instead, we found that older adults exhibited
a lower level of mind wandering compared with younger adults.
These data are more consistent with the decoupling hypothesis and
might also be tied to older adults preserved processing at the
situation model level.
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Appendix
Mind Wandering Contents and Duration per Group and Experiment (in Proportions)
Experiment 1 Experiment 2
Young Old Young Old
Sensory state .07 .04 .07 .04
Yourself .22
ⴱ
.10
ⴱ
.20
ⴱ
.05
ⴱ
School-related .11 .00 .11
ⴱ
.01
Text-related .10
ⴱ
.34
ⴱ
.10
ⴱⴱ
.51
ⴱⴱ
Fantasies .03 .02 .04 .03
Singing a song .02 .01 .02 .00
Worries .04 .02 .04 .02
Sleepy, tired .30
ⴱ
.14
ⴱ
.30
†
.12
†
No thoughts .06 .13 .06 .06
None of the above .05
ⴱ
.20
ⴱ
.06
†
.17
†
⬍5 s .24
ⴱ
.46
ⴱ
.22
ⴱ
.43
ⴱ
6–10 s .39 .46 .39 .46
11–20 s .20
ⴱ
.08
ⴱ
.21
ⴱ
.09
ⴱ
⬎21 s .18
ⴱ
.01
ⴱ
.18 .03
Note. Asterisks are added to the proportions of both conditions being analyzed. Group differences were analyzed within
each experiment only.
†
p ⬍ .10.
ⴱ
p ⬍ .05.
ⴱⴱ
p ⬍ .001.
Received February 8, 2011
Revision received April 13, 2012
Accepted April 16, 2012 䡲
958
KRAWIETZ, TAMPLIN, AND RADVANSKY
