Abstract
Although mind wandering remains ubiquitous in daily life, the processes that underlie and sustain this behavior remain poorly understood. Across two experiments, we studied the role of intrinsic temperament traits, which shape stable behavioral processes, in moderating the association between mind wandering and the real-life functional outcome of academic success. In Experiment 1, participants completed the Mind Wandering Questionnaire, the Adult Temperament Questionnaire, and reported their grade for the highest degree completed or in progress. Individuals with traits of low Effortful control, high Negative affect, and low Extraversion indicated more mind wandering. Effortful control moderated the relationship between mind wandering and academic success, with higher tendency for mind wandering associated with higher academic achievement for individuals with high Effortful control, and lower academic achievement for those with low Effortful control. Experiment 2 confirmed these links using the visual metronome response task, an objective measure of mind wandering. Together, these results suggest that the intrinsic temperament trait of Effortful control represents one of the key mechanisms behind the functional influence of mind wandering on real-life outcomes. This work places an innate ability to control attention at the very core of real life success, and highlights the need for studying mind wandering through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together cognitive, biological, social, and clinical theories in order to understand the fundamental mechanisms that drive this behavior.
Highlights
Many of us have experienced periods of inattention when our mind moves away from a primary task onto other thoughts
Given that the relationship between mind wandering, temperament traits, and academic achievement may be different for younger and older participants and across genders, we examined whether our results varied by age and gender of participants
Consistent with our hypotheses, the temperament trait of Effortful control emerged as the only reliable moderator of the relationship between mind wandering and the real-life outcome of academic achievement, with levels of effortful control regulating the effect of mind wandering on academic achievement
Summary
Many of us have experienced periods of inattention when our mind moves away from a primary task onto other thoughts. Rothbart (2007); model is pertinent for investigations of mind wandering and attention because it positions the cognitive ability of attention as a superordinate self-regulatory mechanism which, through interactions between genes and the environment, helps to shape persistent behavioral styles (Ristic and Enns, 2015) As such, this model provides the necessary theoretical context for investigations of how individual differences in innate regulatory capacities impact a person’s propensity to mind wander and related life outcomes. We hypothesized that individual variability in temperament traits, along the Cognitive-Attentional trait of Effortful control, would reliably relate to frequency of mind wandering and significantly modulate academic achievement This link would provide new evidence for the influence of innate trait-level differences in attentional control in both mind wandering and functional realworld outcomes
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