Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Oct 16;4:742. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00742. eCollection 2013.
Recent research has examined how often mind-wandering occurs about past vs. future events. However, mind-wandering may also be atemporal, although previous investigations of this possibility have not yielded consistent results. Indeed, it is unclear what proportion of mind-wandering is atemporal, and also how an atemporal response option would affect the future-oriented bias often reported during low-demand tasks used to measure mind-wandering. The present study examined self-reported (Experiment 1) and probe-caught (Experiment 2) mind-wandering using the low-demand Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) in younger (18-30) and older (50-73) adults in an experimental paradigm developed to measure mind-wandering using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk). Across self-reported and probe-caught mind-wandering, the atemporal response option was used at least as frequently as past or future mind-wandering options. Although older adults reported far fewer mind-wandering events, they showed a very similar temporal pattern to younger adults. Most importantly, inclusion of the atemporal report option affected performance on the SART and selectively eliminated the prospective bias in self-reported mind-wandering, but not in probe-caught mind-wandering. These results suggest that both young and older participants are often not thinking of past or future events when mind-wandering, but are thinking of events that cannot easily be categorized as either.
最近的研究考察了思维游离于过去事件和未来事件的频率。然而，思维游离也可能是无时间指向的，尽管之前对这种可能性的调查没有得出一致的结果。事实上，尚不清楚无时间指向的思维游离占多大比例，以及在用于测量思维游离的低需求任务中，无时间指向的响应选项会如何影响经常报告的未来导向偏向。本研究使用低需求持续注意力反应任务（SART），在使用亚马逊 Mechanical Turk（Mturk）开发的实验范式中，分别通过自我报告（实验 1）和探测捕捉（实验 2），在年轻（18-30 岁）和年长（50-73 岁）成年人中检查了自我报告和探测捕捉的思维游离。在自我报告和探测捕捉的思维游离中，无时间指向的响应选项的使用频率至少与过去或未来思维游离选项一样高。尽管年长的成年人报告的思维游离事件要少得多，但他们表现出与年轻成年人非常相似的时间模式。最重要的是，包含无时间指向的报告选项会影响 SART 的表现，并选择性地消除自我报告的思维游离中的前瞻性偏向，但不会消除探测捕捉的思维游离中的前瞻性偏向。这些结果表明，年轻和年长的参与者在思维游离时经常不是在思考过去或未来的事件，而是在思考那些不容易被归类为过去或未来的事件。
