Exploring the Basic Mechanisms Underlying Sustained Attention, Attention Lapses and Mind Wandering

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Attention lapses and unwanted moments of mind wandering can lead to a wide range of performance errors including humorous and embarrassing foibles, poor performance in the classroom and at work, and even catastrophic motor vehicle accidents. Yet, the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying attention lapses and mind wandering remain poorly understood. The primary aim of the proposed research program is to examine the external task-related factors that prevent and/or terminate attention lapses and the internal individual traits associated with sustained-attention ability. The research program is divided into three interrelated lines of inquiry each generated and developed in collaboration with the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in my laboratory.**Since attention lapses and bouts of mind wandering are known to occur without an individual's awareness, the first line of inquiry will examine what factors allow individuals to realize that their attention has lapsed and their mind has wandered off task. One set of studies will examine whether naturally occurring breakpoints in tasks, such as paragraph breaks in text or transition points in movies and lectures, can trigger the termination of mind wandering. Another set of studies will evaluate whether personally relevant words (e.g., one's own name), emotionally charged stimuli (such as taboo words), and critical events in otherwise boring tasks, which are known to capture attention, will also lead people to realize their minds have wandered. This work will lead to the formulation of more complete models of mind wandering with more developed mechanisms for the termination of mind wandering episodes, and will have obvious practical implications for preventing and terminating attention lapses in everyday life.**A second line of research will uncover the types of task-related factors that reduce the sustained attention decrement (SAD), which is the general observation that sustained attention performance declines over time. The studies are based on the relatively new hypothesis that the SAD occurs because over time attentional resources become decoupled from the primary vigilance task and are instead applied to internal thoughts (the mind wandering hypothesis). We plan to reduce the SAD by (counter-intuitively) increasing the external demands of a vigilance task, which should lead to less mind wandering and a more durable coupling of attention to vigilance stimuli. We will increase mental workload of the vigilance task by (1) adding a secondary task that couples attention to the vigilance stimuli, (2) increasing the heterogeneity of the infrequent vigilance targets, and (3) reducing target foreknowledge. Critically, showing that increasing mental workload decreases the SAD would directly contradict a widely held view of attention theories, namely, that increasing attentional demands of a task ought to have, if anything, negative consequences on performance.**A final line of research will address the sorts of trait characteristics of individuals that relate to sustained attention performance. Specifically, we will explore whether individuals who are habitually involved in media multi-tasking (MMT e.g., listening to music while working) have atrophied internal control mechanisms that will lead them to perform more poorly on sustained attention tasks. The studies will measure individual differences in MMT and relate them to individual differences in (1) momentary attention lapses, (2) the magnitude of the SAD, and (3) the extent to which MMT depletes attentional resources. This line of work will point to habitual MMT as an important individual difference moderator of sustained attention ability, which will need to be incorporated in cognitive models of sustained attention.