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Journal ArticleDOI

The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review

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TLDR
Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering may play a crucial role in both autobiographical planning and creative problem solving, thus providing at least two possible adaptive functions of the phenomenon.
Abstract
Substantial evidence suggests that mind-wandering typically occurs at a significant cost to performance. Mind-wandering-related deficits in performance have been observed in many contexts, most notably reading, tests of sustained attention, and tests of aptitude. Mind-wandering has been shown to negatively impact reading comprehension and model building, impair the ability to withhold automatized responses, and disrupt performance on tests of working memory and intelligence. These empirically identified costs of mind-wandering have led to the suggestion that mind-wandering may represent a pure failure of cognitive control and thus pose little benefit. However, emerging evidence suggests that the role of mind-wandering is not entirely pernicious. Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering may play a crucial role in both autobiographical planning and creative problem solving, thus providing at least two possible adaptive functions of the phenomenon. This article reviews these observed costs and possible functions of mind-wandering and identifies important avenues of future inquiry.

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Citations
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The influence of mood on the effort in trying to shift one’s attention from a mind wandering phase to focusing on ongoing activities in a laboratory and in daily life

TL;DR: In this article, the effect of mood on self-reported effort in trying to focus back from mind wandering to ongoing things was investigated, and the results showed that participants in a negative mood reported lower levels of focus back effort than those in a positive mood.
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Perceived Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic Mediates the Association Between Self-quarantine Factors and Psychological Characteristics and Elevated Maladaptive Daydreaming

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored a set of lockdown measures and personal factors (e.g., education, history of depression, and personality traits) that might potentially exacerbate maladaptive daydreaming experienced during the lockdown period and examined whether perceived stress acted as a mediator in the relationship between these factors and MD.
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Prior exposure increases judged truth even during periods of mind wandering

TL;DR: This paper investigated whether the illusory truth effect occurs even when people report not paying attention to the information at hand, and found that even during periods of mind-wandering, the repetition of information increases truth judgments.
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Subjective Impact of Age-Related Hearing Loss Is Worse for Those Who Routinely Experience Boredom and Failures of Attention

TL;DR: A greater trait susceptibility to experiencing boredom was associated with a more aversive subjective experience of hearing loss, and this relationship was shown to be mediated by self-reported differences in the ability to maintain task-focused attention.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

TL;DR: The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined.
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A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

TL;DR: The iPhone Hap App reveals that wandering thoughts lead to unhappiness and that doing so typically makes people unhappy.
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'Oops!': performance correlates of everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured and normal subjects

TL;DR: It is shown that errors on the SART can be predicted by a significant shortening of reaction times in the immediately preceding responses, supporting the view that these errors are a result of 'drift' of controlled processing into automatic responding consequent on impaired sustained attention to task.
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The restless mind

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the hypothesis that mind-wandering can be integrated into standard executive models of attention and show that it often occurs in the absence of explicit intention.
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Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering

TL;DR: Cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching consequences, and improves both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity.
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