Project Activities
The project team addressed three questions over the duration of the project:
- What is the most effective way to measure zoning out in the laboratory?
- What are the basic cognitive processes that lead to the occurrence and catching of zoning-out episodes?
- What are the pedagogical implications of zoning out with respect to predicting and correcting comprehension difficulty?
Key outcomes
- In examining the measurement question, the team examined whether zoning out could be detected from eye movements, behavioral techniques (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), or from the use of brain-imaging methods. The team developed a method to record the eye movements of readers who lapsed into bouts of mindless reading.
- Both language processing and working memory were implicated in readers ability to notice when their minds were wandering.
- Mixed results were found in experiments carried out to understand the instructional and educational implications of mind-wandering. How to reduce the amount of mind-wandering, and especially mind wandering at critical junctures in the text, continues to be an area where additional research needs to be completed.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
Publications:
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Book chapters
Reichle, E.D., Pollatsek, A., and Rayner, K. (2007). Modeling the Effects of Lexical Ambiguity on Eye Movements During Reading. In R.P.G. Van Gompel, M.F. Fischer, W.S. Murray, and R.L. Hill (Eds.), Eye Movements: A Window on Mind and Brain (pp. 271-292). Oxford: Elsevier.
Schooler, J.W., Reichle, E.D., and Halpern, D.V. (2004). Zoning Out While Reading: Evidence for Dissociations Between Experience and Metaconsciousness. In D.T. Levin (Ed.), Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children (pp. 203-226). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Journal articles
Hart, R.E., and Schooler, J.W. (2006). Increasing Belief in the Experience of an Invasive Procedure That Never Happened: The Role of Plausibility and Schematicity. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(5): 661-669.
Mooneyham, B.W., and Schooler, J.W. (2013). The Costs and Benefits of Mind-Wandering: A Review. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(1): 11-18.
Pollatsek, A., Reichle, E.D., and Rayner, K. (2006). Tests of the E-Z Reader Model: Exploring the Interface Between Cognition and Eye-Movement Control. Cognitive Psychology, 52(1): 1-56.
Pollatsek, A., Reichle, E.D., and Rayner, K. (2006). Serial Processing is Consistent With the Time Course of Linguistic Information Extraction From Consecutive Words During Eye Fixations in Reading: A Response to Inhoff, Eiter, and Radach (2005). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32(6): 1485-1489.
Reichle, E.D., Reineberg, A.E., and Schooler, J.W. (2010). Eye Movements During Mindless Reading. Psychological Science, 21(9): 1300-1310.
Schooler, J.W., Smallwood, J., Christoff, K., Handy, T.C., Reichle, E.D., and Sayette, M.A. (2011). Meta-Awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(7): 319-326.
Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J.W. (2006). The Restless Mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6): 946-958.
Smallwood, J., Beech, E.M., Schooler, J.W., and Handy, T.C. (2008). Going AWOL in the Brain—Mind Wandering Reduces Cortical Analysis of the Task Environment. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3): 458-469.
Smallwood, J., Fishman, D.J., and Schooler, J.W. (2007). Counting the Cost of an Absent Mind: Mind-Wandering as an Unrecognized Influence on Educational Performance. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14: 230-236.
Smallwood, J., McSpadden, M., and Schooler, J.W. (2007). The Lights are on but no One's Home: Meta-Awareness and the Decoupling of Attention When the Mind Wanders. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(3): 527-533.
Smallwood, J., McSpadden, M., Luus, B., and Schooler, J.W. (2008). Segmenting the Stream of Consciousness: The Psychological Correlates of Temporal Structures in the Time Series Data of a Continuous Performance Task. Brain and Cognition, 66(1): 50-56.
Proceedings
Smith, R., Keramatian, K., Smallwood, J., Schooler, J.W., Luus, B., and Christoff, K. (2006). Mind-Wandering With and Without Awareness: An fMRI Study of Spontaneous Thought Processes. In R. Sun and N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 804-809). Vancouver, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
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