Forrin Noah D, Risko Evan F, Smilek Daniel
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Psychol Res. 2019 Apr;83(3):485-497. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0936-9. Epub 2017 Nov 1.
In many situations, increasing task difficulty decreases thoughts that are unrelated to the task (i.e., mind-wandering). In the context of reading, however, recent research demonstrated that increasing passage reading difficulty actually increases mind-wandering rates (e.g., Feng et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 20:586-592, 2013). The primary goal of this research was to elucidate the mechanism that drives this positive relation. Across Experiments 1-3, we found evidence that the effect of Flesch-Kincaid reading difficulty on mind-wandering is partially driven by hard passages having longer sections of text (i.e., more words per screen) than easy passages when passages are presented one sentence at a time. In Experiment 4, we controlled for reading difficulty, and found that section length was positively associated with mind-wandering rates. We conclude by proposing that individuals may tend to disengage their attention from passages with relatively long sections of text because they appear to be more demanding than passages with shorter sections (even though objective task demands are equivalent).
在许多情况下，增加任务难度会减少与任务无关的思维活动（即走神）。然而，在阅读情境中，最近的研究表明，增加文章阅读难度实际上会提高走神率（例如，Feng等人，《心理通报与评论》，2013年，第20卷，第586 - 592页）。本研究的主要目的是阐明驱动这种正相关关系的机制。在实验1 - 3中，我们发现有证据表明，当每次逐句呈现文章时，弗莱什 - 金凯德阅读难度对走神的影响部分是由难文章比易文章有更长的文本段落（即每屏更多单词）所驱动的。在实验4中，我们控制了阅读难度，发现段落长度与走神率呈正相关。我们的结论是，个体可能倾向于将注意力从文本段落相对较长的文章上转移，因为它们似乎比段落较短的文章要求更高（尽管客观任务要求是相同的）。
