Mind Wandering in Sentence Reading: Decoupling the Link Between Mind and Eye

When people read, their thoughts sometimes drift away from the task at hand: They are "mind wandering." Recent research suggests that this change in task focus is reflected in eye movements and this was tested in an experiment using controlled stimuli. Participants were presented with a series of sentences containing high-and low-frequency words, which they read while being eye-tracked, and they were sometimes probed to indicate whether they were on task or mind wandering. The results showed multiple differences between reading prior to a mind-wandering response and reading when on task: Mind wandering led to slower reading times, longer average fixation duration, and an absence of the word frequency effect on gaze duration. Collectively, these findings confirm that task focus could be inferred from eye movements, and they indicate that the link between word identification and eye scanning is decoupled when the mind wanders.