Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Psychol Res. 2019 Jul;83(5):1057-1069. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0914-2. Epub 2017 Sep 16.
We explored the possibility that increasing participants' motivation to perform well on a focal task can reduce mind wandering. Participants completed a sustained-attention task either with standard instructions (normal motivation), or with instructions informing them that they could be excused from the experiment early if they achieved a certain level of performance (higher motivation). Throughout the task, we assessed rates of mind wandering (both intentional and unintentional types) via thought probes. Results showed that the motivation manipulation led to significant reductions in both intentional and unintentional mind wandering as well as improvements in task performance. Most critically, we found that our simple motivation manipulation led to a dramatic reduction in probe-caught mind-wandering rates (49%) compared to a control condition (67%), which suggests the utility of motivation-based methods to reduce people's propensity to mind-wander.
我们探讨了提高参与者在焦点任务上表现良好的动机是否可以减少思维漫游的可能性。参与者在完成持续注意力任务时，要么接受标准指令（正常动机），要么接受如果达到一定表现水平可以提前退出实验的指令（更高动机）。在整个任务中，我们通过思维探针评估思维漫游（包括有意和无意类型）的频率。结果表明，动机操纵导致有意和无意思维漫游的显著减少，以及任务表现的提高。最重要的是，我们发现我们的简单动机操纵与对照组（67%）相比，导致探针捕捉到的思维漫游率显著降低（49%），这表明基于动机的方法在减少人们思维漫游倾向方面的有效性。
