Mathews Nathan K, Bin Faiz Umer, Brosowsky Nicholaus P
Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 May 10;8:666-687. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00142. eCollection 2024.
Mind wandering is a common experience in which your attention drifts away from the task at hand and toward task-unrelated thoughts. To measure mind wandering we typically use experience sampling and retrospective self-reports, which require participants to make metacognitive judgments about their immediately preceding attentional states. In the current study, we aimed to better understand how people come to make such judgments by introducing a novel distinction between explicit memories of off task thought and subjective feelings of inattention. Across two preregistered experiments, we found that participants often indicated they were "off task" and yet had no memory of the content of their thoughts-though, they were less common than remembered experiences. Critically, remembered experiences of mind wandering and subjective feelings of inattention differed in their behavioral correlates. In Experiment 1, we found that only the frequency of remembered mind wandering varied with task demands. In contrast, only subjective feelings of inattention were associated with poor performance (Experiments 1 and 2) and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the phenomenology of mind wandering may differ depending on how the experiences are brought about (e.g., executive functioning errors versus excess attentional resources), and provide preliminary evidence of the importance of measuring subjective feelings of inattention when assessing mind wandering.
思维游走是一种常见的体验，在此过程中，你的注意力会从手头的任务上转移，转向与任务无关的想法。为了测量思维游走，我们通常使用经验抽样法和回顾性自我报告，这要求参与者对他们之前的注意力状态做出元认知判断。在当前的研究中，我们旨在通过引入任务外思维的显性记忆和注意力不集中的主观感受之间的新区别，更好地理解人们是如何做出这种判断的。在两项预先注册的实验中，我们发现参与者经常表示他们“走神了”，但却对自己想法的内容没有记忆——不过，这种情况比有记忆的经历要少见。至关重要的是，思维游走的记忆经历和注意力不集中的主观感受在行为相关性上有所不同。在实验1中，我们发现只有记忆中的思维游走频率会随任务要求而变化。相比之下，只有注意力不集中的主观感受与表现不佳（实验1和2）以及执行功能的个体差异（实验2）有关。这些结果表明，思维游走的现象学可能因经历产生的方式而异（例如，执行功能错误与注意力资源过剩），并为在评估思维游走时测量注意力不集中的主观感受的重要性提供了初步证据。
