The role of attentional and metacognitive control for mind wandering regulation

走神指的是一个人的思想从此时此地漂移到内心的想法或感觉的日常现象。走神通常发生在一个人积极从事一项正在进行的任务时；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中的表现，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TUTS的易感性之间似乎有很强的关联性。也就是说，在工作记忆广度任务(即高跨度)上表现良好的人通常比表现不佳(即低跨度)的人报告的TUT更少。鉴于TUTS对许多任务的性能至关重要，理解为什么高跨度比低跨度更能防止TUTS是很重要的。对走神的认知失败解释表明，高跨度能够更好地控制他们的注意力，因此更多地成功地阻止了TUTS的发生。然而，我们之前的研究表明，TUT通常可以发挥作用，例如，用于维持未来的目标。因此，我们认为，根据任务需求灵活调整TUT的策略将比一般阻止任何TUT的策略更具适应性。与这一观点一致，我们和其他人发现，高跨度比低跨度对不断变化的任务要求更严格地调节TUT，并且只有在任务表现否则会受到影响的情况下，TUT率才会降低。然而，是什么使高跨度比低跨度能够更恰当地调节TUTS的情况？我们的认知灵活性账户预测，好的TUT调节者需要满足三个标准：他们必须(A)良好的注意力控制能力，(B)良好的元认知监控能力(即，他们必须洞察自己目前在执行任务时做得有多好)，以及他们必须(C)相信自己的注意力是可控的。本研究的第一个目的是检验这三个认知过程是否构成了成功的TUT调节，以及高跨度和低跨度之间观察到的TUT调节差异是否源于前者更好的注意和元认知控制能力。第二个目标是将认知灵活性的解释推广到另一种类型的任务需求，即知觉需求。由于先前的研究表明，高知觉要求的任务以自下而上的方式约束注意力，因此可以预测，注意和元认知控制不是TUTS对知觉要求变化的调节所必需的。因此，高跨度和低跨度应该同样能够根据感知需求调整图坦卡蒙的出现。

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.