Why do we sometimes disengage from what we are doing? And what happens to learning and memory when we do so? Mind-wandering – the shift of attention away from an ongoing task toward internally generated thoughts – is a common part of everyday experience. Although mind-wandering is ubiquitous, important questions remain about when it occurs, how it can be detected, and how it influences cognitive performance.
In this line of research, we investigate the relationship between mind-wandering, boredom, effort, attention, and memory. We are particularly interested in what happens when people disengage while information is being encoded. How do states such as mind-wandering and boredom affect what is later remembered? Does disengagement make it less likely that information will later be remembered? Does it also affect the precision of our memories? And do different memory processes respond differently to periods of disengagement?
Our research addresses these questions using a combination of behavioral methods, self-reports, eye-tracking, and statistical approaches. For example, we have investigated whether mind-wandering during encoding affects not only the likelihood of later recalling spatial information, but also the precision of the recall. Other work examines physiological markers of memory recognition (i.e., the pupil old/new effect) to better understand how disengagement states during encoding relate to subsequent memory.
More broadly, we are interested in understanding mind-wandering as one of several subjective states that emerge during cognitive activity. Current work also investigates how mind-wandering relates to experiences such as boredom and effort, how these states develop over time, and how characteristics of the task and learning environment contribute to their occurrence. By combining subjective experience with behavioral and physiological measures, this research aims to better understand when and why people disengage from cognitive tasks and what this means for learning and memory.
