Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave. West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, 417 Chapel Dr, Durham, NC, 22708, USA.
Psychol Res. 2022 Feb;86(1):87-97. doi: 10.1007/s00426-021-01487-5. Epub 2021 Feb 25.
It has been proposed that motivating participants to perform well on a cognitive task ought to lead to decreases in rates of intentional, but not unintentional, task-unrelated thought (TUT; a commonly studied variety of mind wandering). However, at odds with this prediction, research has found that increasing motivation results in decreases in both intentional and unintentional TUTs. One possible explanation for this surprising finding is that standard assessments of TUT may inadvertently conflate TUTs with another variety of mind wandering: unconstrained thought. If so, then deconfounding task-unrelated and unconstrained varieties of mind wandering might produce the predicted effect of a decrease in intentional, but not unintentional, TUT when motivation is increased. To explore this possibility, in the present study, participants completed a sustained-attention task after receiving standard instructions (normal-motivation condition) or instructions informing them that they could leave the study early if they achieved a certain level of performance (motivated condition). Throughout the task, we assessed rates of TUT (both intentional and unintentional) and unconstrained thoughts. Consistent with prior work, the results indicated that motivated participants reported being on-task significantly more frequently than non-motivated participants. However, unlike previous work, we found that when deconfounding TUTs and unconstrained thoughts, participants in the motivation condition reported significantly fewer bouts of intentional TUT than those in the non-motivation condition, but no differences in rates of unintentional TUT were observed between groups. These results suggest that (a) motivation specifically targets intentional TUT and (b) standard assessments of TUT conflate task-relatedness and thought constraint.
有人提出，激励参与者在认知任务上表现出色，应该会降低有意的、而不是无意的、与任务无关的思维（TUT；一种常见的思维漫游研究类型）的发生率。然而，与这一预测相悖的是，研究发现，增加动机反而会导致有意和无意的 TUT 发生率都降低。对于这一令人惊讶的发现，一种可能的解释是，对 TUT 的标准评估可能会无意中将 TUT 与另一种思维漫游类型混淆：无约束思维。如果是这样，那么将 TUT 和无约束思维这两种类型分开，可能会在动机增加时产生预期的效果，即降低有意的、但不是无意的 TUT。为了探索这种可能性，在本研究中，参与者在接受标准指令（正常动机条件）或告知他们如果达到一定的表现水平就可以提前离开研究的指令（动机条件）后完成了一项持续注意力任务。在整个任务中，我们评估了 TUT（有意和无意）和无约束思维的发生率。与之前的研究一致，结果表明，有动机的参与者比无动机的参与者报告的任务状态显著更高。然而，与之前的研究不同，我们发现，当将 TUT 和无约束思维分开时，动机条件下的参与者报告的有意 TUT 发作次数明显少于非动机条件下的参与者，但两组之间无意 TUT 的发生率没有差异。这些结果表明：（a）动机专门针对有意的 TUT；（b）TUT 的标准评估混淆了任务相关性和思维约束性。
