The contribution of latent factors of executive functioning to mind wandering: an experience sampling study

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that individuals with greater executive resources spend less time mind wandering. Independent strands of research further suggest that this association depends on concentration and a guilty-dysphoric daydreaming style. However, it remains unclear whether this association is specific to particular features of executive functioning or certain operationalizations of mind wandering, including task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs, comprising external distractions and mind wandering) and stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thoughts (SITUTs, comprising mind wandering only). This study sought to clarify these associations by using confirmatory factor analysis to compute latent scores for distinct executive functions based on nine cognitive tasks and relating them to experience sampling reports of mind wandering. We expected that individuals with greater executive control (specifically updating) would show a stronger reduction in SITUTs as momentary concentration and guilty-dysphoric style increase. A bifactor model of the cognitive battery indicated a general factor (common executive functioning) and ancillary factors (updating and shifting). A significant interaction between updating and concentration on mind wandering was observed with mind wandering defined as TUTs, but not as SITUTs (N = 187). A post hoc analysis clarified this discrepancy by showing that as concentration increases, both external distractions and mind wandering decrease more strongly among people with greater updating. Moreover, common executive functioning predicted a more negative slope of guilty-dysphoric style on SITUTs, whereas updating and shifting predicted more positive slopes. The opposite slopes of these executive functions on daily life mind wandering may reflect a stability-flexibility trade-off between goal maintenance and goal replacement abilities.

Mind wandering and sleep in daily life: A combined actigraphy and experience sampling study

“…This definition includes both external distractions (e.g., being distracted by a conversation while driving) and internally oriented mind wandering (e.g., remembering an old friend while driving). About one-third of task-unrelated thoughts are external distractions and the other two-thirds are internally oriented mind wandering (Marcusson-Clavertz et al, 2022). Research on mind wandering and sleep has frequently defined mind wandering as task-unrelated thoughts (e.g., Poh et al, 2016).…”

“…Unguided thoughts have been less frequently examined in research on sleep and mind wandering, but one study observed an association between poor sleep quality and unguided thoughts during a cognitive task (Marcusson-Clavertz et al, 2020). Other potential features of mind wandering include low meta-awareness (drifting away without noticing it; Schooler et al, 2011), distractibility (difficulty maintaining concentration; Lanier et al, 2021), and shifting (switching between mental sets; Marcusson-Clavertz et al, 2022;Wong et al, 2022). More broadly, examining these features may elucidate how everyday cognitive functioning and sleep are related.…”

“…Some of the data collected in Germany (examining the relations of procrastination and rumination to sleep and affect) has already been published (Gort et al, 2021). We have also published data from both sites on how mind wandering relates to executive functioning (Marcusson-Clavertz et al, 2022). We uploaded an analysis plan prior to data collection in 2017 (see supplementary materials).…”

“…We also had a third sleep-related hypothesis, expecting that poor sleep would predict perceived difficulties in controlling one's attention, specifically: (a) low awareness of thoughts, (b) distractibility, and (c) difficulty shifting mental sets. However, because these scales of perceived attentional control were created on the fly and did not predict performance on cognitive tasks as expected (Marcusson-Clavertz et al, 2022), they were difficult to interpret and we therefore chose to report their relations to sleep in supplementary materials to narrow the focus to sleep and mind wandering.…”

“…SDP and DMC acted as experimenters in the Lund site, and a Master's student acted as experimenter in the Mannheim site. The mean age of participants was 23.95 years old (SD = 5.11; 37 % males and 63 % females) and the majority were undergraduate students (for more details on the sample, see Marcusson-Clavertz et al, 2022) 2 . We planned to have a sample of at least 200 participants with a stopping rule stating that we would not collect data beyond a specific date (1st January 2019).…”