The eye–mind wandering link: Identifying gaze indices of mind wandering across tasks.

Abstract

During mind wandering, visual processing of external information is attenuated. Accordingly, mind wandering is associated with changes in gaze behaviors, albeit findings are inconsistent in the literature. This heterogeneity obfuscates a complete view of the moment-to-moment processing priorities of the visual system during mind wandering. We hypothesize that this observed heterogeneity is an effect of idiosyncrasy across tasks with varying spatial allocation demands, visual processing demands, and discourse processing demands and reflects a strategic, compensatory shift in how the visual system operates during mind wandering. We recorded eye movements and mind wandering (via thought-probes) as 132 college-aged adults completed a battery of 7 short (6 min) tasks with different visual demands. We found that for tasks requiring extensive sampling of the visual field, there were fewer fixations, and, depending on the specific task, fixations were longer and/or more dispersed. This suggests that visual sampling is sparser and potentially slower and more dispersed to compensate for the decreased sampling rate during mind wandering. For tasks that demand centrally focused gaze, mind wandering was accompanied by more exploratory eye movements, such as shorter and more dispersed fixations as well as larger saccades. Gaze behaviors were not reliably associated with mind wandering during a film comprehension task. These findings provide insight into how the visual system prioritizes external information when attention is focused inward and indicates the importance of task demands when assessing the relationship between eye movements, visual processing, and mind wandering.

Mind wandering during reading: An interdisciplinary and integrative review of psychological, computing, and intervention research and theory

“…There might be a middle ground. In a recent study with seven different tasks, Faber et al (2020) found that gaze behaviours during mind wandering reliably patterned with respect to task demands in terms of spatial allocation, visual processing and discourse processing, suggesting a task-resemblance hypothesis. Uncovering patterns specific to reading, reading-related (e.g., other narrative processing) versus unrelated tasks would be a fruitful goal.…”

“…Whereas Randall et al (2014) categorizes Risko et al (2012) as a reading comprehension study, it is in fact a study on online lectures, so it is excluded here. 4 The specific studies include (Faber et al, 2020;Faber et al, 2017;Feng et al, 2013;Fulmer et al, 2015;Kopp et al, 2015;Mills et al, 2015;Mills et al, 2013;Mills et al, 2017;Phillips et al, 2016) plus one unpublished study. 5 Beyond immediate comprehension of the text, Sanchez and Naylor (2018) found that mind wandering while reading a text on plate tectonics was associated with more misunderstandings and fewer identified causes of volcanic eruptions.…”

What Eye Movements Reveal About Later Comprehension of Long Connected Texts

“…Similarly, mind-wandering or "zoning out" during reading has been linked to fewer, longer fixations compared to attentive reading (Bixler & D'Mello, 2016;Faber, Bixler, & D'Mello, 2018;Foulsham, Farley, & Kingstone, 2013;Reichle, Reineberg, & Schooler, 2010). Some studies, however, find no effect of mind-wandering on fixation duration (Faber, Krasich, Bixler, Brockmole, & D'Mello, 2020;Smilek, Carriere, & Cheyne, 2010;Uzzaman & Joordens, 2011) and even the opposite effect in terms of number of fixations (Steindorf & Rummel, 2019). Despite these inconsistencies in the gaze correlates of mind-wandering, research indicates that mind-wandering is consistently negatively correlated with reading comprehension (e.g., Faber et al, 2018;Reichle et al, 2010;Uzzaman & Joordens, 2011; see also meta-analysis in Randall, Oswald, & Beier, 2014).…”

Pre-trial Gaze Stability Predicts Momentary Slips of Attention

“…There is also some limited but encouraging success in using machine learning algorithms to predict mind-wandering based on eye-tracking measures [10], [11]. However, the findings from this work are not entirely consistent across studies [12], [13], [14]. Moreover, the measured eye movement patterns were obtained while participants completed the actual task (i.e., viewing a picture or reading a sentence).…”