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Mind Wandering During Reading

Year: 2011
Name of Institution:
University of California, Santa Barbara
Goal: Exploration
Principal Investigator:
Schooler, Jonathan
Award Amount: $1,702,662
Award Period: 4 years
Award Number: R305A110277

Description:

Co-Principal Investigator: Jonathan Smallwood

Purpose: Good reading comprehension requires that the readers attend to the material in front of them. However, despite readers' best intentions, there are times when their minds wander, and they find that although they have "read" a span of text, they did not actually process the content. This "mind wandering" is common and can affect all levels of language processing, including understanding words and parsing sentences. The current project will explore mind wandering in the context of reading to determine the best methods for studying this phenomenon and for creating interventions to help overcome or avoid the effects of it.

Project Activities: This research team will complete three major activities. First, researchers will refine the theoretical and methodological understanding of mind wandering. They will identify the relative contribution of meta-cognitive monitoring and control in modulating the impact of mind wandering, and explore various behavioral indices that may be predictive of self-reported mind wandering during reading (e.g., eye movement and word-by-word response rate). In the second activity, the team will explore the malleability of mind wandering in college students. Finally, the researchers will explore the effects of mind wandering on the reading comprehension of middle and high school students, and examine the degree to which this behavior is malleable. They will do this by exploring the ways in which a mindfulness-based training course and other training techniques affect mind wandering.

Products: Products will include scholarly reports of findings, which may offer insights for studying mind wandering and on-line reading. Additionally, the reports may offer insights for understanding meta-cognitive awareness, and for developing instructional approaches that maximize understanding.

Structured Abstract

Setting: The research will take place in northern California middle and high schools, and university settings.

Population: The participants will be students in middle school, high school, and college.

Research Design and Methods: The research will take place in both laboratory and classroom environments. The first series of experiments explore different methods for detecting mind wandering and will use various behavioral methods, such as self-reported mind wandering, comprehension questions posed during reading, eye tracking, and pupil dilation to detect mind wandering. Participants will read texts on computers under different conditions (e.g., word-by-word or moving window) and then perform various tasks, such as detecting anomalous sentences. In the second series of experiments, participants will read texts while being prompted to focus at different intervals (e.g., when they are likely to be mind wandering or randomly) or while using various focusing techniques (e.g., meditation and "mindfulness breathing"). The third series of studies uses the various techniques explored in the second series into middle school, high school, and/or college classrooms. The purpose of this series of studies is to determine if students of different ages are equally affected by mind wandering and also to identify the techniques used to overcome it (e.g., focusing and meditation). As in the studies in the second series, some students will receive prompts at various moments when they are likely to be mind wandering, during random points, or not at all. Also, similar to the other studies, some students will receive training in the focus techniques and some will not.

Control Condition: There is no control for the first series of studies. In the second and third series of studies, the control group will be those students who receive either no prompts to focus while reading or no training in focusing techniques (e.g., mindfulness breathing).

Key Measures: Key measures include physiological measures (e.g., pupil dilation and eye movements) as well as self-reported mind wandering, sentence anomaly detection, and answers to comprehension questions. Students will also be interviewed to determine whether they were mind wandering.

Data Analytic Strategy: Statistical analyses will include analysis of variance, principal components analysis, and mediational analysis.

Related IES Projects: Lapses In Meta-Cognition During Reading: Understanding Comprehension Failure (R305H030235)

Products and Publications

Book chapter

Chin, J., Mrazek, M. D., Schooler, J.W. (2012). Blind Spots to the Self: Limits in Knowledge of Mental Contents and Personal Predispositions. The Handbook of Self-Knowledge (pp. 77–89). Guilford Press.

Mrazek, M. D., Broadway, J. M., Phillips, D. T., Franklin, M. S., Mooneyham, B. W., & Schooler, J. W. (2014). An Antidote for Wandering Minds. The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Mindfulness. Wiley-Blackwell.

Mrazek, M. D., Mooneyham, B. W., & Schooler, J. W. (2014). Insights from Quiet Minds: The Converging Fields of Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering. Meditation– Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications (pp. 227–241). Springer International Publishing.

Schooler, J. W., Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Baird, B., Mooneyham, B. W., Zedelius, C., & Broadway, J. M. (2014). The Middle Way: Finding the Balance between Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering. Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp. 1–33). Academic Press.

Schooler, J.W., Mrazek, M.D., Baird, B., & Winkielman, P. (2015). Minding the Mind: The Value of Distinguishing between Unconscious, Conscious, and Meta-Conscious Processes. APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition (pp. 179–202). American Psychological Association.

Journal article, monograph, or newsletter

Baird, B, Smallwood, J, and Schooler, J.W. (2011). Back to the Future: Autobiographical Planning and the Functionality of the Wandering Mind. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4): 1604–1611.

Baird, B., Cieslak, M., Smallwood, J., Grafton, S. T., and Schooler, J. W. (2015). Regional White Matter Variation Associated with Domain-Specific Metacognitive Accuracy. Journal Of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27(3): 440–452.

Baird, B., Mrazek, M., Phillips, D. T., and Schooler, J. W. (2014). Domain-Specific Enhancement of Metacognitive Ability Following Meditation Training. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5): 1972–1979.

Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Lutz, A., and Schooler, J. W. (2014). The Decoupled Mind: Mind-Wandering Disrupts Cortical Phase-Locking to Perceptual Events. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(11): 2596–2607.

Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y, Franklin, M. S., and Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by Distraction: Mind-Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation . Psychological Science, 23(10): 1117–1122.

Franklin, M. S., Mrazek, M. D., Anderson, C. L., Johnston, C., Smallwood, J., Kingstone, A., and Schooler, J. W. (2014). Tracking Distraction: The Relationship Between Mind-Wandering, Meta-Awareness, and ADHD Symptomatology. Journal of Attention Disorders, 56(3): 475–486.

Franklin, M. S., Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J. W. (2011). Catching the Mind in Flight: Using Behavioral Indices to Detect Mind-Wandering in Real Time. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5): 992–997.

Franklin, M.S., Mrazek, M.D., Broadway, J.M., and Schooler, J.W. (2013). Disentangling Decoupling: Comment on Smallwood. Psychological Bulletin, 139(3): 536–541.

Franklin, M.S., Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J.W. (2011). Catching the Mind in Flight: Using Behavioral Indices to Detect Mindless Reading in Real Time. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 18(5): 992–997.

Mooneyham, B. W., and Schooler, J. W. (2016). Mind Wandering Minimizes Mind Numbing: Reducing Semantic-Satiation Effects through Absorptive Lapses of Attention. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(4): 1273–1279.

Mooneyham, B. W., Mrazek, M. D., Mrazek, A. J., and Schooler, J. W. (2016). Signal or Noise: Brain Network Interactions Underlying the Experience and Training of Mindfulness. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1369: 240–256.

Mrazek, M. D., Mooneyham, B. W., Mrazek, K. L., & Schooler, J. W. (2016). Pushing the Limits: Cognitive, Affective, and Neural Plasticity Revealed by an Intensive Multifaceted Intervention. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Mrazek, M. D., Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J. W. (2012). Mindfulness & Mind-Wandering: Finding Convergence through Opposing Constructs. Emotion, 12(3): 442–448.

Mrazek, M.D., Franklin, M.S., Phillips, D., Baird, B., and Schooler, J.W. (2013). Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5): 776–781.

Mrazek, M.D., Smallwood, J., Franklin, M.S., Chin, J.M., Baird, B., and Schooler, J.W. (2012). The Role of Mind-Wandering in Measurements of General Aptitude. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(4): 788–798.

Ruby, F. J., Smallwood, J., Sackur, J., and Singer, T. (2016). Is Self-Generated Thought a Means of Social Problem Solving?. Frontiers in Psychology, 4.

Smallwood, J. and Schooler, J.W. (2015). The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology , 66: 487–516.

Smallwood, J., Brown, K., Baird, B., and Schooler, J. W. (2012). Cooperation Between the Default Mode Network and the Frontal-Parietal Network in the Production of an Internal Train of Thought. Brain Research, 1428: 60–70.

Smallwood, J., Brown, K., Baird, B., Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., and Schooler, J. W. (2012). Insulation for Daydreams: A Role for Tonic Norepinephrine in the Facilitation of Internally Guided Thought. PLoS One, 7(4).

Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., and Schooler, J. W. (2011). Medicine for the Wandering Mind: Mind-Wandering in Medical Practice. Medical Education, 45(11): 1072–1080.

Smallwood, J., Ruby, F.J.M., and Singer, T. (2013). Letting go of the Present: Mind-Wandering is Associated With Reduced Delay Discounting. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(1): 1–7.

Smallwood, J., Tipper, C., Brown, K., Baird, B., Engen, H., Michaels, J.R., Grafton, S., and Schooler, J.W. (2013). Escaping the Here and Now: Evidence for a Role of the Default Mode Network in Perceptually Decoupled Thought. Neuroimage, 69: 120–125.

Zedelius, C.M., Broadway, J.M., and Schooler, J.W. (2015). Motivating Meta-Awareness of Mind-Wandering: A Way to Catch the Mind in Flight?. Journal of Consciousness and Cognition, 38: 44–53.

Proceeding

Broadway, J. M., Zedelius, C., Mooneyham, B. W., Mrazek, M. D., Schooler, J. W. W (2015). Stimulating Minds to Wander. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (pp. 3182–3183).