Abstract
Mind wandering has been considered as a mental process that is either independent from the concurrent task or regulated like a secondary task. These accounts predict that the form of mind wandering (i.e., images or words) should be either unaffected by or different from the modality form (i.e., visual or auditory) of the concurrent task. Findings from this study challenge these accounts. We measured the rate and the form of mind wandering in three task conditions: fixation, visual 2-back, and auditory 2-back. Contrary to the general expectation, we found that mind wandering was more likely in the same form as the task. This result can be interpreted in light of recent findings on overlapping brain activations during internally- and externally-oriented processes. Our result highlights the importance to consider the unique interplay between the internal and external mental processes and to measure mind wandering as a multifaceted rather than a unitary construct.
Highlights
Our minds often drift away from the present task and wander around task-unrelated thoughts [1,2]
We examined the effect of mind wandering on task performance, by comparing task accuracy across the three mind states: on-task, intra-modal mind wandering, and cross-modal mind wandering
There was a significant difference that participants were more accurate when mind wandering in a different form as the concurrent task than when wandering in the same form, p =
Summary
Our minds often drift away from the present task and wander around task-unrelated thoughts [1,2]. Recent research suggests that the experience of mind wandering is multi-dimensional and the form of thoughts during mind wandering varies along unique dimensions such as the modality and level of intrusiveness or detail [3,4]. The modality of the thoughts is a unique dimension in which visual imagery, like a film, and auditory forms, like an audiobook, are in opposition, with particular brain areas linked to each of the two forms [3,4,5]. Mind wandering has been traditionally defined as being independent or unrelated to the concurrent task [6]. It is described as an internal train of thought, separated from the external
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