Abstract
Mind wandering has recently received extensive research because it reveals an important characteristic of our consciousness: conscious experience can arise internally and involuntarily. As the first attempt to examine mind wandering in a non-western population, the present study used experience-sampling method to collect the daily momentary mind wandering episodes in a Chinese sample. The results showed that mind wandering was also a ubiquitous experience among the Chinese population, and, instead of emerging out of nowhere, it was often elicited by external or internal cues. Furthermore, most of the mind wandering episodes involved prospective thinking and were closely related to one’s personal life. Finally, the frequency of mind wandering was influenced by some contextual factors. These results taken together suggest that mind wandering plays an important role in helping people to maintain a continuous feeling of “self” and to prepare them to cope with the upcoming events.
Highlights
Mind wandering is one of the most ubiquitous experiences in our daily lives
We analyzed whether self-reported mind wandering was systematically associated with particular contexts by Hierarchical linear and nonlinear model (HLM)
The results showed that internal cue and positive emotion predicted a closer relation of mind wandering to one’s self and plan, and calm emotion predicted a lower relevance with one’s plan
Summary
Mind wandering is one of the most ubiquitous experiences in our daily lives. It is generally defined as an involuntary conscious experience that comes from internal mental processes, and is not directly related to the immediate environment or the task at hand [1,2,3,4]. It has been found that mind wandering, dependent on its context (e.g. during a laboratory task or during a daily life event), occurs 15% to 50% of the time when it is probed [5,8,9,10,11]. Another frequently addressed topic is the negative impact of mind wandering on the performance of tasks at hand, it remains controversial whether mind wandering consumes executive resources [4,12,13]. The temporal focus of mind wandering, especially its prospective bias, has received much attention [18,19,20]
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