Mind wandering probes as a source of mind wandering depends on attention control demands

Mind wandering is a topic of great interest in many areas, but as with all psychological constructs, the interpretation of experimental results might depend on the way it is measured. A common way of measuring mind wandering in experiments is with self-report thought probes. An important question with this methodology is if the probe itself may be influencing participants' mind wandering. Previous research suggests that multiple thought probes throughout a task may lead to less mind wandering. However, in some studies (e.g., Schubert et al, 2019) the probes occurred during a recorded lecture video and in the others (e.g., Seli et al, 2016) the probes occurred during a sustained attention to response task (SART). What is missing in the current literature is a comparison of the effect the number of thought probes has on mind wandering during a task that requires a greater deal of thought control throughout the task to perform well, such as a complex span task or working memory. As such, in the two experiments presented here we randomly assigned participants to one of four conditions. Conditions contained a minimum of one and a maximum of six probes. In the first experiment, we found that participants who had received fewer probes mind wandered less during an operation span task, supporting our hypothesis. In the second experiment, we found that participants who had received fewer probes mind wandered more during a video lecture. The results suggest that thought probes interact with attentional control demands to influence mind wandering.