Given the that we've established that all people mind wander and that we are very often unaware of our mind wandering, the question "Does mind wandering make up more or less happy," is a substantial one. This week's articles very practically examine the effects of mind wandering on individuals rather than simply assume it is a negative experience and suggest solutions. This week's readings ask the necessary questions: Does it make us happy, does it sadden us, does it make us less competent?
Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert believe so. In their article entitled "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind" their stance is clear - mind wandering causes unhappiness. Their study has some clever design elements. Through the use of an iPhone app, they managed to make experience sampling an inexpensive and efficient method of gathering data. Experience Sampling calls for asking people to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions when questioned, at random moments throughout the day. The iPhone app really does seem like the ideal manner to efficiently, cheaply and quickly gather this data. Furthermore, I appreciated the care the experimenters took to ensure that the questions they asked participants did not influence their answers to the next questions. By ensuring that "the happiness question was always asked before the mind wandering question, and that the mind wandering question was asked before the question about current activity, participants were less likely to have one answer inform the next (Killingsworth).
The results/discoveries found in the study are likewise very straight forward. I was particularly interested in (and would like to possibly further explore) the fact that mind wandering frequencies in this study were "considerably higher" than typically seen in laboratory environments (Killingsworth, 932). This discovery merits further study since in may influence the interpretation and critiques of the conclusions of many studies which we deem foundational. If this experience sampling found such a large discrepancy in mind wandering reports, there are more problems with laboratory design of experiments on this topic than previously thought.
In addition to the large report of mind wandering Killingsworth found that the nature of people's activities had very little consequence on whether or not their minds wandered and that people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were not.
That last assertion is where I become skeptical of this study. Killingsworth et. al. claims that "although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering, time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in [their] sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (932). In the online supplement to their article they further discuss how they arrived at that conclusion and, to me, it is not nearly satisfactory. It seems like the two researchers are making a basic mistake and concluding that a correlation indicates causation. There is definitely a third variable problem here which they are not adequately accounting for. Mind wandering does not need to be the cause of the unhappy mood. Rather an unhappy mood can easily be the cause of the mind wandering or something completely different! Killingsworth et. al. try to dismiss this possibility by saying that "mind wandering was strongly related to whether [a participant] had been mind-wandering in the previous sample, but was unrelated to the whether they were mind wandering in the next sample" (Killingsworth). This is an absurd claim to make considering that the participants were not providing samples nearly frequently enough. He states that the iPhone application was defaulted to probe the participant 3 times a day. Though he never clarifies what the average number of probes was, we can assume that it was somewhere in that range. Since these probes are evenly divided throughout the participants waking time it is silly to assume that the person will consistently be experiencing the same emotion during each prompt or instance of mind wandering. A full 5 hours may go by before prompted again the feelings associated with that distant mind wandering moment hardly seem to be enough to cause the participants mood.
In "Why does Working Memory Capacity Predict Variation in Reading Comprehension?" Jennifer McVay and Michael Kane, look at individual difference between participants to try and pin down what makes some people better at reading. They approached this by looking at:
1) lapses of attention to the task (in the form of TUT) during reading and other tasks that demanded attention.
2) performance measures on simple attention tasks and determining whether they are helpful for predicting comprehension.
3) examining a variable known to predict working memory capacity and seeing if attention control plays a part in the relationship.
This study is based on past research that suggests that "readers with lower WMC had les capacity to integrate information form the text and from background knowledge into a working mental model" (McVay et. al., 303). McVay et. al.'s hypothesis runs off of this and states, "that the one mechanism responsible for the dynamic memory processes involved in reading is executive attention" and that individual differences in attention control are partially responsible for the connection between WMC and comprehension" (McVay et. al. 303). The experimenters measured TUTs or mind wandering during two task types, attention - control and reading comprehension. Here McVay is looking to take one step closer towards establishing a cause and effect relationship.
She and team discovered that subjects were significantly less accurate on occasions when they reported TUTs than when they reporte on-task thoughts on Stroop incongruent trials but were numerically more likely to answer reading comprehension questions correctly despite reporting on task thinking. They write it off as merely a statistical consequence of yes no questions, however, I believe that is a cop out. They conclude that their hypothesis was correct and "mind-wandering vulnerability mediates the relationship between individual differences in the WMC/attention control and reading comprehension. The results for the most part suit their hypothesis but this does not. It implies that there is possibly a difference between reading comprehension and other types of attention demanding tasks. While this is not the aim of their study it does raise questions about the how their theory may be influenced by other specific attention demanding tasks.
This study is not a direct response to the the question of what the quality or emotional response to mind wandering is for an individual, but it does very clearly indicate that individual differences in mind wandering exist and are significant. It does not ask for reports on how or how much each participant feels their mind wandering affects their lives, but that would perhaps be the next step. Now that we know that there is a difference, we could explore how that difference really, practically and (perhaps) emotionally affects participants.
In "Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation," Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood et. al., conducted a study on the implications of mind wandering. They specifically looked at "creative situations" which required participants to solve previously encountered problems after an "incubation period" during which they were asked to complete another task.
For the experiment the participants were prompted to think of as many unusual uses for a given item as possible. The following is the breakdown of the experimental conditions.
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| bold and italics row represents the "incubation period" |
In "Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming," Delaney and Sahakyan discuss a study which developed the diversion paradigm. This model has two groups. The experimental condition group studies a list of items, engages in "diversionary thought," studies a second list of items, and then does a free- recall test to name as many items as they can. The control group did the same with the exception of the "diversionary thought." The study found that participants who engaged in "diversionary thought" remembered significantly fewer items than the control group. This study and the subsequently developed context-change account (a theory that proposes that a divisionary thoughts set up new mental contexts) are the corner stones of the Delaney and Sahakyan study. Their hypothesis is that "when people imagine an event, they mentally travel to and immerse themselves in the context of that event. Consequently, a diverting imagined event can disrupt and change one's mental context, creating a contextual-mismatch with ongoing reality" (Delaney et. al. 1037). Additionally they propose that "the degree of forgetting should depend on how different the current context is from the imagined context" (Delaney et. al. 1037).
The results of the experiment showed significant forgetting. The near-change and the control groups did not differ significantly.
Delaney and Sahakyan completed a second experiment designed almost exactly like the first. This time participants had all recently taken a vacation and that vacation was used as the subject of the diversionary thoughts. The experimenters hypothesized that the participants who had taken and were asked to mind wander on their international vacations (far-change) would miss more list 1 words than participants who had taken and were told to think about the vacations they had taken within the USA (near-change).
As can be seen in this figure, their hypothesis was correct. "Participants in the control condition recalled more List 1 words than those in the near-change condition, who in turn recalled more words than the participants in the far change condition. Thus, thinking about an international vacation was associated with greater recall impairment than thinking about domestic vacations.
An important thing to note is that the experimenters also established that the amount of forgetting (in experiment 1) was directly related to the amount of time since they lived in their parents house and (in experiment 2) forgetting was directly related to how far away the vacation location was; the longer and the further away, the more forgetting.
Generally I thought this was a very strong study and I was very interested by their theories, methods, and conclusions. However, I take issue with some of the foundations of the theories the experimenters were using. While it is true that the context in which one learns information becomes salient to the recall of that information, I am unclear how these experiments 100% match that theory. The context that the participant are being asked to recall is indeed distant from their present one, but they are not necessarily ever leaving their present context. Having someone draw their home or think about a vacation does not remove them from the fact that they are in a lab partaking in an experimental study.
Delaney and Sahakyan also stated that "according to context theories, people forget not because of the passage of time per se, but rather because of the drift in context, which correlates with the passage of time" (Delaney 1037). Though this seems intuitively true, it seems even more intuitive to me that each recall of the information learned add new context with which the individual can and will associate it. This might be particularly true if each instance of recall was particularly memorable or significant (possibly being at a trivia night or recalling information needed to answer an important question at work).
I usually try and avoid making my judgements too based on personal experience but given that the articles both have their good points and flaws I will say that I enjoy letting my mind wander. As Killingsworth et. al. says it is "the brains default mode" (932). It only becomes frustrating trying to accomplish something important or when in a rush. Creativity definitly does seem to come from letting the mind wander but the issues is stopping it when you most want it. However, if we had control over it, would it really be mind wandering? Most studies that "induce" mind wandering acknowledge that it is more of an induction of a task unrelated thought than mind wandering (which is why the Baird study was refreshing). Maybe seeking to control and limit mind wandering, which would clearly be advantageous in certain situation, would actually defeat the purpose of having this mechanism and make all it's advantages impossible. So perhaps we should resign ourselves to Hamlet's wise words "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," and think less about the good or bad of mind wandering.
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References:
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Baird, Benjamin., Smallwood, Jonathan., Mrazek, Michael D., Kam, Julia W. Y., Franklin, Michael, S., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2012). Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation. Psychological Science 23 1117-1122.
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Baird, Benjamin., Smallwood, Jonathan., Mrazek, Michael D., Kam, Julia W. Y., Franklin, Michael, S., Schooler, Jonathan W. (2012). Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation. Psychological Science 23 1117-1122.
Delaney, Peter F., Sahakyan, Lili, Kelley, Colleen M., Zimmerman, Carissa A. (2010). Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming. Psychological Science 21 1036-1042.
Killingsworth, Matthew A., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science Magazine 330 932.
Killingsworth, Matthew A., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2010). Supporting Online Material for A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science Magazine 330.
Killingsworth, Matthew A., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science Magazine 330 932.
Killingsworth, Matthew A., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2010). Supporting Online Material for A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science Magazine 330.
McVay, Jennifer C., Kane, Michael J. (2012). Why does Working Memory Capacity Predict Variation in Reading Comprehension? Journal of Experimental Psychology 141 302 - 320.
