Like most areas of cognitive investigation, mind-wandering research is dominated by laboratory and neuroimaging methods here, subjects engage an ongoing task that is periodically interrupted for them to report or categorize their current thoughts (e.g., as on- or off-task Giambra, 1995 Mason et al. It is also beginning to figure into general theories of executive control, metacognition, and the “default-mode” brain network (e.g., Bar, 2007 Buckner & Carroll, 2007 Burgess, Dumontheil, & Gilbert, 2007 Mason et al., 2007 Schooler, 2002 Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) we have argued, for example, that unwanted mind-experiences represent momentary failures of goal maintenance that reflect, in part, enduring individual differences in executive control ( Kane et al., 2007 McVay & Kane, 2009). Mind wandering thus co-occurs with events of scientific and practical interest.
Moreover, despite controversy about the causal functions of consciousness (e.g., Morsella, 2005 Rosenthal, 2008 Wegner, 2002), field and laboratory studies of human performance (e.g., Reason, 1990 Smallwood et al., 2004) indicate that errors increase when people report experiencing task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). For example, the commonplace experience of moving one’s eyes across a page without comprehending a thing suggests the startling conclusion that we are sometimes unaware of our own conscious experience if we “knew” our thoughts were elsewhere, we would return to reading or drop the charade ( Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004).
The study of mind wandering provides a novel means to explore fundamental issues of consciousness. The propensity to mind-wander appears to be a stable cognitive characteristic and seems to predict performance difficulties in daily life, just as it does in the laboratory. We also conceptually replicated laboratory findings that mind wandering predicts task performance: subjects rated their daily-life performance to be impaired when they reported off-task thoughts, with greatest impairment when subjects’ mind wandering lacked meta-consciousness. Subjects who reported more mind wandering during the laboratory task endorsed more mind-wandering experiences during everyday life (and were more likely to report worries as off-task thought content).
In an experience-sampling study that bridged laboratory, ecological, and individual-differences approaches to mind-wandering research, 72 subjects completed an executive-control task with periodic thought probes (reported by McVay & Kane, 2009) and then carried PDAs for a week that signaled them 8 times daily to report immediately whether their thoughts were off-task.
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