Abstract
Research from the last decade has successfully used two kinds of thought reports in order to assess whether the mind is wandering: random thought-probes and spontaneous reports. However, none of these two methods allows any assessment of the subjective state of the participant between two reports. In this paper, we present a step by step elaboration and testing of a continuous index, based on response time variability within Sustained Attention to Response Tasks (N = 106, for a total of 10 conditions). We first show that increased response time variability predicts mind wandering. We then compute a continuous index of response time variability throughout full experiments and show that the temporal position of a probe relative to the nearest local peak of the continuous index is predictive of mind wandering. This suggests that our index carries information about the subjective state of the subject even when he or she is not probed, and opens the way for on-line tracking of mind wandering. Finally we proceed a step further and infer the internal attentional states on the basis of the variability of response times. To this end we use the Hidden Markov Model framework, which allows us to estimate the durations of on-task and off-task episodes.
Highlights
Mind wandering refers to the occurrence of task-unrelated and stimulus-independent thoughts (Stawarczyk et al, 2011)
How can we extrapolate subjective states away from discrete moments when subjects report them? Here, we propose the following strategy: first, we design a candidate index of mind wandering: this index should both correlate with subjective states when these are available, and it should be based on objective measures that are available even when participants do not report on their subjective states
Contrasting the trials preceding thought reports First, based on previous evidence that, in the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), response time variability is higher in trials before no-go errors than in trials before successful withholding of the response (Cheyne et al, 2009), we wanted to assess whether response time variability was higher preceding mind wandering reports compared to on-task reports
Summary
Mind wandering refers to the occurrence of task-unrelated and stimulus-independent thoughts (Stawarczyk et al, 2011). In daily life, this spontaneous tendency of the mind to drift away from the here-and- occurs about 30–50% of the time, with surprisingly few differences regarding the task at hand (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Mind wandering has been mainly accessed through discrete thought sampling: participants are randomly probed about their subjective states. This method only assesses mind wandering at the moment of the probe, but that tells us nothing about the time-course of the alternating states
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