The Incidence Characteristics And Influence Factors Of Mind Wandering In Differenttasks

The problem of consciousness in psychology has always been concerned, Among which there is a kind of experience in the "stream of consciousness", named Mind Wandering (MW),which is very familiar to each of us, but always ignored by us. Whatever in the goal-oriented tasks, or in the resting state, individuals always frequently experience MW, about a third of individual’time is filled with this kind of consciousness experience in study (eg, Reichle et al.,2010). MW occurs in different tasks, according to decoupling hypothesis, the rates of MW occur most frenquently in the simple signal detection tasks. With the increase of task difficulty, such as from signal detection tasks to coding memory tasks, then to reading tasks which is needed more cognitive resource to participate, the incidences of MW gradually decline. According to this phenomena, in the past, there were a lot of researches about the participents of college students, probed the incidence characteristics of MW in different difficult tasks, and found that decoupling hypothesis can not effectively explain all MW occurrence characteristics in different difficult tasks. How does the mind wandering happen in different difficult tasks, and how to explain the occurrence characteristics, and what will possible influence the occurrence characteristics? above problems are to be discussed in this research.Based on the participents of college students, from the perspective of different difficult cognitive tasks, computer behavior experiment and eye movement experiment were used to in this research to systematically probe the incidence characteristic of college students in different difficult tasks, and at the same time, to probe impact effects from the task time, working memory and the current concerned event.The main research conclusions are as follows:1. In the different difficult tasks (sustained attention reaction task, coding task and text-reading task), the MW incidence of college students reduced with the increase of task difficulty; In each task, the incidence of MW increased significantly with the increase of the task time.2. With the difficulty of digital material content, the MW incidence of college students, on the whole, presented the U-shaped, in low and medium difficult tasks, MW incidence reduced with the increase of task difficulty; With the task difficulty increasing, the MW incidence increased instead. In the low and medium difficult tasks, the MW incidence improved significantly with the increase of task time. But in the most difficult task, the incidence of MW declined significantly with the increase of time. Compared to students with low working memory capacity, students with high working memory capacity had higher MW incidence in low and medium difficult tasks, but had lower MW incidence In the most difficult task.3. With the different task difficulty of text material content, the MW incidence of college students, on the whole, also presented the U-shaped, in low and medium difficult tasks, MW incidence reduced with the increase of task difficulty; With the task difficulty increasing, the MW incidence also gradually increased instead. In the low, medium and the most difficult tasks, the incidence improved significantly with the increase of task time. Compared to students with low working memory capacity, students with high working memory capacity had relatively lower MW incidence in the three relatively difficult tasks.4. In text reading task, when the reading content is the individuals’ higher concerning event, the incidence of MW in students with working memory capacity existed no differences, when the reading contents were the individuals’ lower concerning events, students with high working memory capacity had more MW to happen likely.