The role of attentional and metacognitive control for mind wandering regulation

走神描述了一个人的思想从此时此地飘向内心想法或感受的日常现象。走神经常发生在一个人积极参与正在进行的任务时;也就是说，走神表现为与任务无关的想法（TUT）。重要的是，TUT已被证明会干扰认知任务的表现以及许多日常活动，如阅读或驾驶。有趣的是，工作记忆能力和TUT的易感性之间似乎有很强的联系。也就是说，在工作记忆广度任务中表现良好的人（即，高跨度）通常比表现不太好的人报告更少的TUT（即，低跨度）。鉴于TUT对许多任务来说都是性能关键的，因此了解为什么高跨度比低跨度更能防止TUT是很重要的。对走神的认知失败解释表明，高广度者能够更好地控制他们的注意力，因此更容易成功地预防TUT的发生。然而，我们以前的研究表明，TUT通常可以发挥作用，例如维持未来的目标。因此，我们认为，根据任务需求灵活调节TUTs的策略将比一般阻止任何TUTs之一更具适应性。根据这一想法，我们和其他人发现，高跨度调节TUT更强烈地改变任务的要求比低跨度和显示TUT率下降，只有在任务的表现，否则会受到影响的情况下。然而，是什么使高跨度调节图坦卡门更适当的情况比低跨度？我们的认知灵活性帐户预测，良好的TUT监管机构需要满足三个标准：他们必须有（a）良好的注意力控制能力，（B）良好的元认知监控能力（即，他们必须了解他们在执行任务时目前做得有多好），并且他们必须（c）相信他们的注意力是可控的。本项目的第一个目的是测试这三个认知过程是否是成功的TUT调节的基础，以及所观察到的高跨度和低跨度之间的TUT调节差异是否是由于前者具有更好的注意力和元认知控制能力。第二个目的是将认知灵活性账户推广到TUT的调节，以适应另一种类型的任务需求，即感知需求。由于先前的研究表明，高知觉要求的任务是以自下而上的方式约束注意的，因此可以预测，注意和元认知控制对于TUTs对知觉要求变化的调节是不必要的。因此，高跨度和低跨度应该同样能够调整TUT发生感知需求。

Mind wandering describes the everyday phenomenon of one’s thoughts drifting away from the here and now towards inner thoughts or feelings. Mind wandering often occurs while one is actively engaged in an ongoing task; that is, mind wandering manifests itself as task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Importantly, TUTs have been shown to interfere with performance in cognitive tasks as well as with many everyday activities, such as reading or driving. Interestingly, there seems to be a strong association between working-memory capacity and the susceptibility to TUTs. That is, people who perform well on working-memory-span tasks (i.e., high-Spans) typically report fewer TUTs than people who perform less well (i.e., low-Spans). Given that TUTs are performance-critical for many tasks, understanding why high-Spans are better able than low-Spans to prevent TUTs is important. The cognitive-failure account of mind wandering suggests that high-Spans are better able to control their attention and therefore more often succeed in prevent TUTs from occurring. However, our previous research shows that TUTs can often be functional, for example for maintaining future goals. Consequently, we argue that a strategy of flexibly regulating TUTs in accordance with task demands would be more adaptive than one of generally blocking out any TUTs. In line with this idea, we and others found that high-Spans regulate TUTs more strongly to changing task demands than low-Spans and show decreased TUT rates only in situations in which task performance would otherwise suffer. However, what enables high-Spans to regulate TUTs more situation-appropriately than low-Spans? Our cognitive-flexibility account predicts that good TUT regulators need to fulfill three criteria: They must have (a) good attention-control abilities, (b) good metacognitive-monitoring abilities (i.e., they must have insight into how well they are currently doing while performing a task), and they must (c) trust their attention to be controllable. The first aim of the present project is to test whether these three cognitive processes underlie successful TUT regulation and whether the observed TUT-regulation differences between high-Spans and low-Spans are due to better attention and metacognitive control abilities of the former. A second aim is to generalize the cognitive-flexibility account to the regulation of TUTs to another type of task demands, namely perceptual demands. Because previous research has shown that task with high perceptual demands bind attention in a bottom-up manner, it is predicted that attention and metacognitive control is not necessary for the regulation of TUTs to changes in perceptual demands. Consequently, high-Spans and low-Spans should be similarly able to adjust TUT occurrences to perceptual demands.