Session 4: Consequences & functionality of mind wandering

Today's articles consider positive and negative consequences of mind wandering. Killingsworth and Gilbert(2010)* found that mind wandering is associated with unhappiness: specifically, people tend to be no happier when mind wandering to pleasant topics than they are when they are on task, and they tend to be unhappier when mind wandering to negative or neutral topics. McVayand Kane (2012)** described the tendency to mind wander as a major mediating factor for why lower working memory capacity (WMC) predicts poorer reading comprehension. Delaney et al. (2010)*** described how mind wandering, particularly to topics that are distant in time or space from the current environment, can lead to forgetting of information learned immediately before the mind wandering episode. By contrast, Baird, Smallwood, and Schooler (2011)**** suggested that mind wandering can be a form of problem solving related to an individual's general goals for the future. These consequences do not seem mutually exclusive, with the possible exception of McVay and Kane's (2012) findings and Baird et al.'s (2011) findings related to working memory, and they suggest other potential positive consequences of mind wandering.

First, Baird et al.'s (2011) positive consequence of mind wandering is compatible with Killingsworth and Gilbert's (2010) and Delaney et al.'s (2010) negative consequences. Baird et al. (2011) proposed that mind wandering varies in temporal focus (i.e., past, present, or future) and on certain cognitive dimensions including whether the thoughts are self-related or goal-directed. They found that self-related and goal-directed thoughts tend to be associated with future-focused mind wandering (Baird et al., 2011). None of these categories of thought are incompatible with unhappiness or forgetting of recently learned present-focused information. If someone is thinking about a potential future problem, he or she could very well be unhappier than someone focusing on a more mundane present task. And thinking about a future problem can be expected to shift someone's mental context away from a current task, as Delaney et al. (2010) described, and the farther in the future or the more dissimilar from the current task the future problem is, the greater the shift would be, resulting in more forgetting of information learned just before the mind wandering began. Thus, Delaney et al.'s (2010) findings could be paired with Baird et al.'s (2011) findings to predict that someone mind wandering to future topics is likely to be thinking about a goal or problem unrelated to the current task and is also likely to forget information related to the current task that was learned just before the mind wandering episode.

But Baird et al.'s (2011) findings regarding working memory capacity (WMC) appear to conflict with McVay and Kane's (2012) findings. McVay and Kane (2012) found a negative correlation between WMC and reading comprehension that was partially mediated by general mind wandering tendency (as measured on other, non-reading comprehension tasks). In other words, they found that low WMC predicts more mind wandering and poorer reading comprehension and that the tendency to mind wander, which decreases with higher WMC, explains a significant portion of WMC's predictive value for reading comprehension (McVay & Kane, 2012). By contrast, Baird et al. (2011) found no significant correlation between WMC and mind wandering in general but found a positive correlation between WMC and prospective mind wandering, which means that people with higher WMC actually tend to mind wander more, not less, about the future, than people with lower WMC do. Thus, based on Baird et al.'s (2011) findings, one would not predict that the relationship between WMC and reading comprehension could be mediated by mind wandering tendency as McVay and Kane (2012) found because the high-WMC people who mind wander more about future events should have better reading comprehension based on their WMC but poorer reading comprehension based on mind wandering tendency. Perhaps there are differences in individuals' tendencies to mind wander about different topics, and those topic-based differences are important to predicting the positive and negative consequences of mind wandering.

Finally, Delaney et al.'s (2010) and Baird et al.'s (2011) findings suggest other potentially positive functions of mind wandering. Baird et al. (2011) described mind wandering as solving future problems, but people could also have ongoing problems and goals associated with a past event, such as accepting a rejection or the loss of a loved one. If mind wandering can be a mechanism to resolve future problems, could it not also be a mechanism to resolve past and present conflicts? Also, Delaney et al. (2010) asserted that the context shift accompanying daydreaming causes forgetting of just-learned material by reducing the effectiveness of retrieval cues for that information. Thus, returning to the earlier mental context should reduce this form of forgetting (Delaney et al., 2010). But the contextual retrieval cues process brings to mind the study technique of associating information with particular locations during studying and then recalling those locations as a retrieval cue during a test. If so, is it possible that mind wandering could serve as a retrieval cue for information related to some personal goal?

* Killingsworth, M. A. & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330, 932.

** McVay, J. C. & Kane, M. J. (2012). Why does working memory capacity predict variation in reading comprehension? On the influence of mind wandering and executive attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 302-320.

*** Delaney, P. F., Sahakyan, L., Kelley, C. M., & Zimmerman, C. A. (2010). Remembering to forget: the amnesiac effect of daydreaming. Psychological Science, 21, 1036-1042.

**** Baird, B., Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2011). Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 1604-1611.