A Study On The Characteristics Of Mind Wandering Cycles Based On The Distinction Of Mind Wandering States

Mind wandering is a very common phenomenon in our daily lives.It refers to a mental process where our internal self-generated thoughts draws our attention away from the external circumstance or the ongoing task.In previous studies about mind wandering,the researchers usually use the probecaught method or the self-caught method to measure the individuals’ tendency to mind wandering.The indicators employed by these two methods to describe the mind wandering tendency are different.In the probe-caught method,mind wandering tendency is indicated by the time proportion of mind wandering in a period of experiment.And in the self-caught method,mind wandering tendency is reflected by the times of occurrence.Therefore,these two methods may output inconsistent results in some circumstances.To resolve this problem,it was proposed that the average durations of the two main states of the focus-mind wandering periods might serve as two informative indicators of mind wandering tendency.It is necessary to differentiate the focus states and mind wandering states before going to estimate the average durations,which is unrealistic only by probe-caught method or self-caught method.A recent study calculated the average duration of focus states and mind wandering states by combining the results of the probe-caught method and the self-caught method.Although this new approach has initially realized the differentiation between the two main states of the focus-mind wandering period,there are still some gaps to be filled.For instance,since the task demand of these two methods are different,it was unclear whether the periodicities of mind wandering are consistent under the conditions of different methods.What’s more,mind wandering frequency was found to increase with the time on task,hence the effects of time should be taken into consideration if measure these two indicators separately.Although this problem could be resolved by balanced experimental design,it will greatly increase the time cost required to estimated the periodicities of mind wandering.Thus,the aim of the current study is to investigate how improve the existing approach based on the shortcomings and develop the method to differentiate and measure the two main states of mind wandering periods.For these purposes,we performed a series of experiments.In the first experiment,we studied the effects of self-caught method on the time proportion of mind wandering,which fill one of the gaps of the approach proposed by previous study.In the second experiment,we made some improvement and innovation based on the previous method,and then proposed a new method that could measure the indicators of mind wandering periodicity more directly.The improvements we have made to the method are mainly reflected in two aspects:1)the adaptation of computer program to match each focus-mind wandering period with each probe trial through combining the self-caught method and probe-caught method interactively;2)the indicators of mind wandering periodicities could be measured in one program instead of in different experimental session separately.What’s more,in this the experiment two,we used the new approach to investigate the relation between the executive capacity and the average duration of the two main states of focusmind wandering periods.The last experiment was perform to study the effects of the time on task on the mind wandering periodicities.The results of the first experiment demonstrated that the self-caught method didn’t produce any inhibiting effect in the time proportion of mind wandering.Previous studies also showed that the probe was a non-reaction method.Based on these results,it is implied that the indicators measured in the conditions of different experience sampling methods can be used to calculated the average duration of the main states of focus-mind wandering periods.In the second experiment,we proposed a new approach to measure the focus-mind wandering periods,where the task performance of sustained attention to response task(SART)was employed to indicate the reliability of the new method.The results of the experiment two suggested that the relation between SART performance and the time proportion of mind wandering obtained by our new method was consistent with previous study.This explains to some extent the reliability of our improved method.Apart from that,as one kind of Go/No-go task,the performance of SART can partly reflect the individuals’ executive capacity.The result suggested that the relation between executive capacity and mind wandering tendency was mainly showed by the focus states instead of mind wandering states,which provide a new evidence for Process-occurrence framework of mind wandering proposed by Smallwood et al.In the last experiment,we used the new approach to investigate the mechanism behind the effects of the time on task on the mind wandering in terms of the periodicities.The result of this experiment showed that the time on task could decrease the capacity for sustaining attention on the ongoing task while has little effects on the average duration of mind wandering states.The results of the current study have important implications for both the methodology and the theory of mind wandering.These implications and the limitations of the current study are discussed.