Abstract
Recent research has examined how often mind-wandering occurs about past vs. future events. However, mind-wandering may also be atemporal, although previous investigations of this possibility have not yielded consistent results. Indeed, it is unclear what proportion of mind-wandering is atemporal, and also how an atemporal response option would affect the future-oriented bias often reported during low-demand tasks used to measure mind-wandering. The present study examined self-reported (Experiment 1) and probe-caught (Experiment 2) mind-wandering using the low-demand Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) in younger (18–30) and older (50–73) adults in an experimental paradigm developed to measure mind-wandering using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk). Across self-reported and probe-caught mind-wandering, the atemporal response option was used at least as frequently as past or future mind-wandering options. Although older adults reported far fewer mind-wandering events, they showed a very similar temporal pattern to younger adults. Most importantly, inclusion of the atemporal report option affected performance on the SART and selectively eliminated the prospective bias in self-reported mind-wandering, but not in probe-caught mind-wandering. These results suggest that both young and older participants are often not thinking of past or future events when mind-wandering, but are thinking of events that cannot easily be categorized as either.
Highlights
In order to exclude participants who had already participated in Experiment 1, since there is no direct way to do this on Mechanical Turk (MTurk), we implemented three precautions
There was an interaction with age, participants reported no more future-oriented mind-wandering relative to atemporal mindwandering. These results suggest that participants may be influenced by aspects of task design, such as the presence or absence of an atemporal option when reporting temporal mind-wandering
Additional hints as to why older adults might tend to be less past-focused in particular can be found in our exploratory correlational analyses, where we found that neuroticism was positively correlated with retrospective mind-wandering, as well as subjective health being negatively correlated with retrospective mind-wandering, even when controlling for neuroticism
Summary
Recent investigations into mind-wandering have revealed that off-task thoughts are frequent (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010), resource-demanding (Smallwood and Schooler, 2006; Smallwood, 2010; see McVay and Kane, 2010), associated with negative mood (Smallwood et al, 2007b, 2009a; Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010) and are often disruptive in the face of a competing, ongoing task (Smallwood et al, 2004; Kane et al, 2007; Cheyne et al, 2009; McVay and Kane, 2009). Smallwood et al (2009b) found that when performing tasks low in cognitive demand, such as passive viewing of digits or a choice reaction time (RT) task, participants tended to think about the future as opposed to the past when mind-wandering. Participants completing a relatively demanding working memory task tended to think about the past and future at similar rates, as opposed to the prospective bias observed during passive digit viewing. These data suggest a penchant for thinking about the future whenever an individual is disengaged from an ongoing task ( see Smallwood et al, 2011a)
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