Abstract
Mind wandering is a drift of attention away from the physical world and towards our thoughts and concerns. Mind wandering affects our cognitive state in ways that can foster creativity but hinder productivity. In the context of learning, mind wandering is primarily associated with lower performance. This study has two goals. First, we investigate the effects of text semantics and music on the frequency and type of mind wandering. Second, using eye-tracking and electrodermal features, we propose a novel technique for automatic, user-independent detection of mind wandering. We find that mind wandering was most frequent in texts for which readers had high expertise and that were combined with sad music. Furthermore, a significant increase in task-related thoughts was observed for texts for which readers had little prior knowledge. A Random Forest classification model yielded an -Score of 0.78 when using only electrodermal features to detect mind wandering, of 0.80 when using only eye-movement features, and of 0.83 when using both. Our findings pave the way for building applications which automatically detect events of mind wandering during reading.
Highlights
The phenomenon of mind wandering is well known to all of us: While reading, driving, or engaging in a routine task, we often find our attentional focus drifting to internal thoughts or concerns.Mind wandering is defined as “a shift in the contents of thoughts away from an ongoing task and/or external environment to self-generated thoughts and feelings” [1]
Self-caught reports from participants included timestamps of the experienced episodes of mind wandering, behavioral data included a questionnaire relating to text and self-perception, and physiological measurements included the signals acquired from an eye-tracker and an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor
The performance of the three machine learning classifiers is first compared along the task of detecting mind wandering during reading
Summary
The phenomenon of mind wandering is well known to all of us: While reading, driving, or engaging in a routine task, we often find our attentional focus drifting to internal thoughts or concerns. Mind wandering is defined as “a shift in the contents of thoughts away from an ongoing task and/or external environment to self-generated thoughts and feelings” [1]. Mind wandering can be classified along two dimensions: task-related thoughts (TRTs) and task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). These types affect task performance and mental well-being of people differently. While task-related thoughts foster creativity and problem-solving ability [1,2], task-unrelated thoughts are associated with decreasing learning performance and reading comprehension [3,4]. One of the central challenges in mind wandering research is the complexity of detecting and quantifying it.
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