Missing the Joke: Reduced Rereading of Garden-Path Jokes During Mind-Wandering

Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading 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."). Rereading text prior to the punchline can help resolve the incongruity. In a main study and a preregistered replication, participants read jokes and nonfunny controls embedded in filler texts and responded to thought probes that assessed intentional and unintentional mind-wandering. Results were consistent across the two studies: When the reader was not mind-wandering, jokes elicited more rereading (from the punchline) than the nonfunny controls did, and had a recall advantage over the nonfunny 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 rereading, which is important for resolving higher level comprehension difficulties.