Thought Probes As A Source Of Mind Wandering Depend On Attentional Control Demands

Download or read book Thought Probes As A Source Of Mind Wandering Depend On Attentional Control Demands written by Maren Greve and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mind wandering is a topic of great interest in many areas, but as with all psychological constructs, the interpretation of experimental results might depend on the way it is measured. A common way of measuring mind wandering in experiments is with self-report thought probes, which researchers have done in a variety of tasks. An important question with this methodology is if the probes themselves may be influencing participants' mind wandering. What is missing in the current literature is a comparison of the effect the number of thought probes has on mind wandering. As such, in the three experiments presented here we randomly assigned participants to receive varying amounts of thought probes during two different tasks. In the first experiment, we found that participants who had received fewer probes mind wandered less during an operation span task. In the second experiment, we found that participants who had received fewer probes mind wandered more during a video lecture. In the third experiment, which was conducted as a within-subjects design, we found that participants mind wandered more during the operation span task compared to the video and mind wandered more when they received more probes compared to fewer probes. The results suggest that thought probes interact with attentional control demands to influence mind wandering.