Imagine you are driving to a meeting. It’s a long drive and you don’t want to miss your exit off the freeway. But while you are driving, your mind begins to wander off to other things, like the argument you had with your spouse yesterday, or the Hawaiian vacation you are planning for next winter. And then after a while you notice that you past your exit over a ten minutes ago! Does this mean there is something wrong with you? Are you starting to lose your mind? The answer is no. As Zanesco and colleagues confirmed in a meta-analysis of 68 studies of mind wandering during task performance, it just means you are like everyone else!
Abstract
Attention has a seemingly inevitable tendency to turn inward toward our thoughts. Mind-wandering refers to moments when this inward focus diverts attention away from the current task-at-hand. Mind-wandering is thought to be ubiquitous, having been estimated to occur between 30% and 50% of our waking moments. Yet, it is unclear whether this frequency is similar within-task performance contexts and unknown whether mind-wandering systematically increases with time-on-task for a broad range of tasks. We conducted a systematic literature search and individual participant data meta-analysis of rates of occurrence of mind-wandering during task performance. Our search located 68 research reports providing almost a half-million total responses to experience sampling mind-wandering probes from more than 10,000 unique individuals. Latent growth curve models estimated the initial occurrence of mind-wandering and linear change in mind-wandering over sequential probes for each study sample, and effects were summarized using multivariate meta-analysis. Our results confirm that mind-wandering increases in frequency over time during task performance, implicating mind-wandering in characteristic within-task psychological changes, such as increasing boredom and patterns of worsening behavioral performance with time-on-task. The systematic search and meta-analysis provide the most comprehensive assessment of normative rates of mind-wandering during task performance reported to date.
Citation
Zanesco, A. P., Denkova, E., & Jha, A. P. (2024). Mind-wandering increases in frequency over time during task performance: An individual-participant meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000424
Dr Martin Fracker 