We tested the hypothesis that mindwandering and external distraction are both manifestations of a common state of reduced attention focus, and examined how both relate to reported level of happiness. We conducted real-time sampling of people's experience of mindwandering and distraction, irrelevant distractions (e.g. music, phone, etc.), and happiness levels, in two studies with 524 people undertaking common daily-life activities. All irrelevant external distractions were positively correlated with mindwandering. Indeed mindwandering duration could be predicted from the duration of external distraction, when controlling for a range of background variables. An exploratory factor analysis of mindwandering and distraction reports suggested a single underlying construct. In addition, duration of irrelevant distraction by both mobile phones and mindwandering was significantly associated with reduced reported levels of happiness. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that that a state of reduced attention focus underlies both mindwandering and distractibility and clarify the link with happiness.

Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) science is by definition transdisciplinary. However, the communication and collaboration between constituent disciplines needed for true transdisciplinarity remains relatively rare. Consequently, many of the potential benefits of MBE science remain unrealized for parties on all sides of the discipline. The present commentary first conducts an analysis of the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of transdisciplinary partnerships in MBE. A new, free, and international web platform (“UNIFIED”) is then proposed to broker relationships between researchers and teachers within schools. This website would allow users to form collaborations based on a system of tags indexing their research interests as well as practicalities such as their location. Such a website appears well placed to realize many of the opportunities, and mitigate the threats and weaknesses, of transdisciplinary MBE research. The article concludes with an appeal to interested researchers and schools to contribute to the development of the project.

Teachers become rapidly more effective during the early years of their career but tend to improve increasingly slowly thereafter. This article reviews and synthesises converging evidence from neuroscience, psychology, economics and education suggesting that teachers’ rate of growth slows because their practice becomes habitual. First, we review evidence suggesting that teaching is highly conducive to habit formation and that teachers display characteristic features of habitual behaviour. Next, we review empirical findings that performance asymptotes, as seen in teachers’ learning curves, coincide with the reallocation of behaviour regulation to neural circuits governing habitual behaviour. Finally, original data is presented showing that teachers’ behaviour becomes automatic around the time that teacher effectiveness begins to level off. Collectively, this evidence implies that professional development should involve repeated practice in realistic settings in order to overwrite and upgrade existing habits.

Adolescents face critical education milestones (e.g. final school exams). The understanding of whether attention continues to develop in adolescence is thus important both for cognitive development theory, and its application to attention during classroom lessons. Previous research however involves some discrepancies concerning whether attention has matured by early adolescence, or continues to develop. Here we investigated whether immature selective attention may be found in the presence of distractors which are known to capture attention, even when entirely task-irrelevant and emotionally-neutral; and also whether high perceptual load, a well-established determinant of focused attention, may improve any immature attention abilities in adolescents. Furthermore we examined whether our task measures can predict adolescents inattention in the school classroom. 166 adolescents (aged 12-17) and 50 adults performed in a letter-search task, under low or high perceptual load, while attempting to ignore irrelevant distractor faces. Adolescents then reported their distractibility level during a preceding classroom lesson. The results established that while distractor interference did not differ from adults, and was equally reduced by increased perceptual load across all ages, sustained attention continued to develop until adulthood, as indicated by increased response variability and error rates across perceptual load levels. Both distractor interference and response variability were significant unique predictors of distractibility in the classroom, including when interest in the lesson and cognitive aptitude were controlled for. Overall, the results both clarify the development of sustained and selective attention in adolescence, and establish these as significant predictors of attention in the important educational setting of the school classroom.