Psychology 2800E Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Mind-Wandering, Psychonomic Society, Intrusive Thought

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2800E
• Professor: Doug Hazelwood

Document Summary

Mind wandering while reading easy and difficult texts. Hi fe(cid:374)g, id(cid:374)e(cid:455) d"mello a(cid:374)d a(cid:396)thu(cid:396) c g(cid:396)aesse(cid:396) Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2013, volume 20, issue 3, 586-592- Mind wandering is a phenomenon in which attention drifts away from the primary task to task- unrelated thoughts. Previous studies have used self-report methods to measure the frequency of mind wandering and its effects on task performance. Many of these studies have investigated mind wandering in simple perceptual and memory tasks, such as recognition memory, sustained attention, and choice reaction time tasks. Manipulations of task difficulty have revealed that mind wandering occurs more frequently in easy than in difficult conditions, but that it has a greater negative impact on performance in the difficult conditions. The goal of this study was to examine the relation between mind wandering and task difficulty in a high-level cognitive task, namely reading comprehension of standardized texts.