This weeks readings are an exciting opportunity to take a more in depth look at many of theories proposed regarding attention and mind wandering over the last few weeks as well as the methodology used by the experimenters in past studies. Additionally the fact that this weeks readings directly respond to each other allow for an excellent opportunity to test and challenge the limits the theories proposed by each.
The main article of the week "The Restless Mind," is a review of several studies - some of which have already been discussed in this blog. Researchers Smallwood and Shooler aim to "frame [previous] literature on mind wandering in a ontet that will enable it's integration into mainstreem models of executive attention. By specifically exploring what role executive attention can be said to play in studies conducted over the last 30 years on mind wandering, Smallwood and Schooler bring light to some of the more complex or unclear results and elements of past research.
The main thrust of the article is that "mind wandering is a situation in which executive control shifts away from a primary task to the processing of a personal goal" (Smallwood, Schooler 2006). They state that executive control does not directly shit attention away from one task to another but rather that a stimulus related to the primary task draws the individual's attention to another goal and their executive control then engages with that task, unaware of the fact that it has shifted. The main support for this theory lies in the studies run by experimenters like Giambra, Antrobus, and Schooler himself. These men and their teams have run studies that indicate that mind wandering is significantly less likely to occur when the individual is involved in a task that has high demands on controlled processing. Additionally if mind wandering is already occuring the individual will perform poorly (with a lot of errors) on a really demanding task. Similarly multiple goes at a task and practice may lead to habituation which allows for more mind wandering since cognitive processes are not being engaged.
In order for Smallwood and Schooler's theory to work a few assumptions must be made:
- Individuals have a hierarchy of goals (i.e. they can have multiply personally relevent goals)
- Some fo these goals can be triggered automatically by salient stimuli
- conscious and meta-awareness are distinct (i.e the individual have active goals- this involves consciousness however they are not always aware of the fact that they have begun processing and problem solving for that issue).
An additional interesting distinction that Smallwood and Schooler make is that mind wandering needs memory retrieval. The individual must be accessing their memory system. Smallwood and School claim there is evidence that mind wandering is associated with a shift of information retrieval by use of familiarity instead of recall. That is something more familiar will manifest itself when mind wandering rather than something that the individual must really think about to remember.
McVay and Kane's 2010 article published in the same journal directly responds to Smallwood and Schooler. In, "Does Mind Wandering Reflect Executive Function or Executive Failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008)" McVay and Kane reiterate some of the Smallwood Schooler claims as well as those by Watkins et. al. published in 2008. They are critical of the theories proposed and instead propose that "mind wandering reflects a failure of the executive control-system to adequately combat interfearing thoughts that are generated and maintained automatically" (McVay, Kane, 189).
This difference in theory is actually quite significant. The implications are (perhaps) that (under this theory) mind wandering can we lessened through training and design of the activity. The McVay theory places the cause of mind wandering as a failure of the individuals executive processing to focus. Schooler and Smallwood were much more likely to attribute the cause of the mind wandering to be situational. They acknowledge he fact that Smallwood and Schiller's theory is not necessarily the most parsimonious. A few of the elements (dichotomy between consciousness and meta-awareness and hierarchy of goals) require a lot of explaining and qualification to work.
Smallwood quickly responded to the McVay in an article, "Why the Global Availability of Mind Wandering Necessitates Resource Competition: Reply to McVay and Kane", a few months later. He rejects the control failure hypothesis possibility (proposed by McVay et. al.). Instead he defends the conception that attention and focus make demands on resources. This is clear to him because of the global availability (control failure is always reportable).
This back and forth does an excellent job of really flushing out the theories and using various common studies to back them up (ex: Stroop test). However, despite all the evaluation and theorizing there are a few crucial aspects of the study of mind wandering that I feel have not reached a satisfactory consensus or conclusion.
Self-caught mind wandering - or self - reports are indeed useful. There are circumstances in which an experimenter might really be interested in what the participant has to say about mind wandering. Nevertheless I am not convinced that asking participants to stop themselves and report on instances of mind wandering does not affect the total number of occurrences. It seems to me that this level of self awareness adds more the the participants cognitive load. They are working on a task and at the same time activly trying to understand their behavior. Smallwood and Schooler say that "it is unclear whether the self monitoring approach indexes changes the results from engaging in mind wandering or changes that result from catching oneself mind wandering," and "although attending to mind wandering may alter our experience, there has been little empirical support for this premis (Smallwood et. al, 948). However if this is really the case it might be evidence that there is something more complicated going on with working memory and cognitive load, because being tasked with awareness of mind wandering is indeed an additional task that the participant is doing that the other group is not.
Sources:
McVay, Jennifer C., Kane, Michael J. (2010). Does Mind Wandering Reflect Executive Function or Executive Failure? Comment on Smallwood and
Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). Psychological Bulletin, 135, 188-197.
Smallwood, Jonathan. (2010). Why the Global Availability of Mind Wandering Necessitates Resource Competition: Reply to McVay and Kane. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 202-207.
Smallwood, Jonathan., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2006). The Restless Mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 946-958.
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