Recent investigations into mind-wandering have revealed that off-task thoughts are frequent ( Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010), resource-demanding ( Smallwood and Schooler, 2006 Smallwood, 2010 although see McVay and Kane, 2010), associated with negative mood ( Smallwood et al., 2007b, 2009a Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010) and are often disruptive in the face of a competing, ongoing task ( Smallwood et al., 2004 Kane et al., 2007 Cheyne et al., 2009 McVay and Kane, 2009). These results suggest that both young and older participants are often not thinking of past or future events when mind-wandering, but are thinking of events that cannot easily be categorized as either. Most importantly, inclusion of the atemporal report option affected performance on the SART and selectively eliminated the prospective bias in self-reported mind-wandering, but not in probe-caught mind-wandering.
Although older adults reported far fewer mind-wandering events, they showed a very similar temporal pattern to younger adults. Across self-reported and probe-caught mind-wandering, the atemporal response option was used at least as frequently as past or future mind-wandering options. The present study examined self-reported (Experiment 1) and probe-caught (Experiment 2) mind-wandering using the low-demand Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) in younger (18–30) and older (50–73) adults in an experimental paradigm developed to measure mind-wandering using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk). Indeed, it is unclear what proportion of mind-wandering is atemporal, and also how an atemporal response option would affect the future-oriented bias often reported during low-demand tasks used to measure mind-wandering. However, mind-wandering may also be atemporal, although previous investigations of this possibility have not yielded consistent results. Recent research has examined how often mind-wandering occurs about past vs. 2Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA.
1Department of Psychology, Washington University in St.
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