The Consistency across Vigilance and Reading Tasks of Individual Differences in the Occurrence of Task-Unrelated and Task-Related Images and Thoughts

Abstract

The production of task-unrelated (TUITs) and task-specific (TST) images and thoughts during vigilance, a shallow information processing task, and during reading, a semantic task requiring deep processing, was examined in thirty-nine 17- to 75-year-old men and women. High positive correlations resulted ( p < .01) between the vigilance and the reading tasks on the likelihood of having both deliberate and unintentional TUITs. However, relatively low between-task correlations resulted for TST frequency. The results indicate that low and high TUIT frequency individuals in the reading task will also have, respectively, low and high TUIT frequencies in the vigilance task. Thus, support for the notion of stable individual differences in TUIT production is indicated. No between-task consistency was evident for TST frequency. TST production may be more directly influenced by the immediate task, as opposed to an individual cognitive capacity for processing information.

Mind wandering while reading easy and difficult texts

“…However, the present study indicated that mind wandering was more frequent in the difficult than in the easy condition, which is inconsistent with previous studies that have found that task difficulty is associated with a reduction in the frequency of mind wandering. It is also contrary to Grodsky and Giambra's (Giambra & Grodsky, 1989;Grodsky & Giambra, 1990/ 1991 finding that passage difficulty was not related to mind wandering.…”

“…First, we did not investigate the role of interest. The lack of a measure of interest might be a limitation because previous studies have shown that interest is negatively related to mind wandering (Giambra & Grodsky, 1989;Grodsky & Giambra, 1990/1991Smallwood, Nind, & O'Connor, 2009). It might be that interest in a text has a compensatory effect on the relation between text difficulty and mind wandering.…”

“…Giambra and Grodsky tracked mind wandering during reading by obtaining human-provided ratings of passage difficulty, and asked readers to rate interest in the passages (Giambra & Grodsky, 1989;Grodsky & Giambra, 1990/1991. The authors found that mind wandering was not related to passage difficulty, but was related to readers' interest.…”

“…Text difficulty in our study was manipulated by creating two versions of a set of texts, instead of having humans rate the difficulty of texts, as was the case in the Giambra and Grodsky (Giambra & Grodsky, 1989;Grodsky & Giambra, 1990/1991 studies. One goal of this study was to investigate how text difficulty impacts mind wandering.…”

Intelligence and Cognitive Control

“…Also, individual differences in the propensity to experience TUTs appear stable over time and reliable across a variety of primary tasks. For example, Grodsky andGiambra (1990-1991) found that, while TUT rates were lower during a complex reading task than during a vigilance task, people with higher TUT rates in one task also had higher rates in the other (r = 0.51). Giambra (1995) also demonstrated the test-retest reliability of the thought-probe procedure during vigilance tasks.…”