Missing the Joke: Reduced Re-reading of Garden-path Jokes during Mind-wandering

Abstract

© 2019, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors' permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000745 Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the current task, occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced re-reading when the reader read the so-called "garden-path jokes." In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the violation creates a semantic incongruity that needs to be resolved (e.g., "My girlfriend has read so many negative things about smoking. Therefore, she decided to quit reading."). Re-reading text prior to the punchline can help resolve the incongruity. In a main study and a pre-registered replication, participants read jokes and non-funny controls embedded in filler texts and responded to thought probes that assessed intentional and unintentional mind-wandering. Results were consistent across the two studies: Eye-tracking results show that, when the reader was not mind-wandering, jokes elicited more re-reading (from the punchline) than the non-funny controls did, and had a recall advantage over the non-funny controls. During mind-wandering, however, the additional eye movement processing and the recall advantage of jokes were generally reduced. These results show that mind-wandering is associated with reduced re-reading, which is important for resolving higher-level comprehension difficulties.