Relationships between mind-wandering and attentional control abilities in young adults and adolescents

Manipulating cues in mind wandering: Verbal cues affect the frequency and the temporal focus of mind wandering

“…Moreover, by assessing separately MW and ED, we could show that only MW increased under the exposure to verbal cues. This pattern of results confirms previous studies showing that MW and ED are two partially distinct processes, that can be differentiated at the behavioural (Stawarczyk et al, 2014;Unsworth & McMillan, 2014) and physiological level (e.g. pupillary correlates in Unsworth & Robison, 2016).…”

“…Task-related contents consisted of any reference to some task features or to the participant's overall performance (i.e., thoughts about the experiment's duration or the number of target stimuli successfully detected), whereas task-unrelated mental contents did not include references to the task at hand (see Plimpton et al, 2015) and included "external distraction" (ED) and "mind wandering" (MW) (see Stawarczyk et al, 2011;Stawarczyk, Majerus, Catale, & D' Argembeau, 2014).…”

Children with positive attitudes towards mind-wandering provide invalid subjective reports of mind-wandering during an experimental task

“…More importantly, it demonstrated the validity of self-reports of MW by children, through subjective reports correlating in a theoretically-expected manner with behavioural correlates. As an early exploration of children's MW experiences, the present study extended our knowledge of MW, from MW in children to MW in elderly adults (Stawarczyk, Majerus, Catale, & D'Argembeau, 2014;Zavagnin et al, 2014).…”

“…Mind-wandering (MW), often referred to as task-unrelated thought (TUT), stimulus-independent thought (SIT), or daydreaming, occurs when our mind drifts away from the ongoing task and focuses instead on internal thoughts which is unrelated to the present situation (Smallwood, 2010;Smallwood & Schooler, 2006;Stawarczyk, Majerus, Catale, & D'Argembeau, 2014;Zavagnin, Borella, & De Beni, 2014). Rapid advances have occurred in the study of MW over the past decade, but little is known about the MW experiences of children.…”

Conjoint influence of mind-wandering and sleepiness on task performance.

“…You created this PDF from an application that is not licensed to print to novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Similarly to our previous studies (e.g., Stawarczyk et al, 2014;Stawarczyk, Majerus, Maj, et al, 2011), several examples reflecting each kind of response to the thought probes were provided to the participants and they were asked to classify 10 thoughts in the adequate categories before the beginning of the SART. They also carried out two training blocks before starting the complete task and were given a written summary of the instructions to help them in case of doubt when responding to the thought probes.…”