- Title
- Self-reported mind wandering reflects executive control and selective attention
- Creator
- Hawkins, Guy E.; Mittner, Matthias; Forstmann, Birte U.; Heathcote, Andrew
- Relation
- ARC.DE170100177 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE170100177 | DP180103613 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP180103613
- Relation
- Psychonomic Bulletin and Review Vol. 29, Issue 6, p. 2167-2180
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02110-3
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Mind wandering is ubiquitous in everyday life and has a pervasive and profound impact on task-related performance. A range of psychological processes have been proposed to underlie these performance-related decrements, including failures of executive control, volatile information processing, and shortcomings in selective attention to critical task-relevant stimuli. Despite progress in the development of such theories, existing descriptive analyses have limited capacity to discriminate between the theories. We propose a cognitive-model based analysis that simultaneously explains self-reported mind wandering and task performance. We quantitatively compare six explanations of poor performance in the presence of mind wandering. The competing theories are distinguished by whether there is an impact on executive control and, if so, how executive control acts on information processing, and whether there is an impact on volatility of information processing. Across two experiments using the sustained attention to response task, we find quantitative evidence that mind wandering is associated with two latent factors. Our strongest conclusion is that executive control is impaired: increased mind wandering is associated with reduced ability to inhibit habitual response tendencies. Our nuanced conclusion is that executive control deficits manifest in reduced ability to selectively attend to the information value of rare but task-critical events.
- Subject
- mind wandering; executive control; selective attention; sustained attention; decision-making; self-report
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1478139
- Identifier
- uon:50116
- Identifier
- ISSN:1069-9384
- Rights
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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