The role of attentional and metacognitive control for mind wandering regulation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan-Thoralf Rummel
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453804677

Mind wandering describes the everyday phenomenon of one’s thoughts drifting away from the here and now towards inner thoughts or feelings. Mind wandering often occurs while one is actively engaged in an ongoing task; that is, mind wandering manifests itself as task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Importantly, TUTs have been shown to interfere with performance in cognitive tasks as well as with many everyday activities, such as reading or driving. Interestingly, there seems to be a strong association between working-memory capacity and the susceptibility to TUTs. That is, people who perform well on working-memory-span tasks (i.e., high-Spans) typically report fewer TUTs than people who perform less well (i.e., low-Spans). Given that TUTs are performance-critical for many tasks, understanding why high-Spans are better able than low-Spans to prevent TUTs is important. The cognitive-failure account of mind wandering suggests that high-Spans are better able to control their attention and therefore more often succeed in prevent TUTs from occurring. However, our previous research shows that TUTs can often be functional, for example for maintaining future goals. Consequently, we argue that a strategy of flexibly regulating TUTs in accordance with task demands would be more adaptive than one of generally blocking out any TUTs. In line with this idea, we and others found that high-Spans regulate TUTs more strongly to changing task demands than low-Spans and show decreased TUT rates only in situations in which task performance would otherwise suffer. However, what enables high-Spans to regulate TUTs more situation-appropriately than low-Spans? Our cognitive-flexibility account predicts that good TUT regulators need to fulfill three criteria: They must have (a) good attention-control abilities, (b) good metacognitive-monitoring abilities (i.e., they must have insight into how well they are currently doing while performing a task), and they must (c) trust their attention to be controllable. The first aim of the present project is to test whether these three cognitive processes underlie successful TUT regulation and whether the observed TUT-regulation differences between high-Spans and low-Spans are due to better attention and metacognitive control abilities of the former. A second aim is to generalize the cognitive-flexibility account to the regulation of TUTs to another type of task demands, namely perceptual demands. Because previous research has shown that task with high perceptual demands bind attention in a bottom-up manner, it is predicted that attention and metacognitive control is not necessary for the regulation of TUTs to changes in perceptual demands. Consequently, high-Spans and low-Spans should be similarly able to adjust TUT occurrences to perceptual demands.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Anna-Lena Schubert