Differences in mind-wandering between visual and auditory sustained attention tasks

Abstract

Mind-wandering (MW) is a voluntary task-unrelated-thought which occurs when individuals failed in controlling attention during the current task. Previous studies examining the mechanism of MW mostly used sustained attention tasks by visually presenting stimuli. However, there are also studies suggesting that the auditory stimuli capture our attention more automatically. In the present study, we compared the indices of mind-wandering between during visual and auditory sustained attention tasks. We also measured participant’s working memory capacity (WMC) which represents the executive function. We found that (1) in the auditory attention task, the frequency of MW was moderated by WMC but not the degree of verbal/visual MW and that (2) in the visual attention task, the degree of verbal/visual MW was moderated by WMC but not the frequency of MW. These results indicate that MW is influenced by the task modality.