![]() ![]() In this procedure, participants are stopped throughout a task and asked to indicate where their attention is focused. The method for collecting mind-wandering that is addressed in this review is the probe-caught method. Because meta-awareness is often lacking, however, there is seldom a relationship between self-caught mind-wandering and performance in studies of self-caught mind-wandering (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004)-a relationship that is commonly found with objective measures of mind-wandering (e.g., Smallwood, Brown, et al., 2011). This type of mind-wandering requires participants to be aware of their internal state without any prompting (“meta-aware” Schooler, 2002). In the self-caught method-much less popular, and not of interest to this review-participants voluntarily indicate, at any moment in time during a task, when their attention has shifted away from that task (Giambra, 1989). The method of collecting subjective, self-reported mind-wandering reports can be further divided into two approaches: self-caught and probe-caught. ![]() In this review, I systematically catalogue the specific methodologies of studies from the past decade that have used the “probe-caught” method for investigating mind-wandering. Because the field has exploded so quickly, though, the methods used to collect mind-wandering reports have not followed a set protocol. Since the field of mind-wandering exploded in 2006 (Callard, Smallwood, Golchert, & Margulies, 2013), researchers have looked at various factors, both internal and external, that impact people’s levels of mind-wandering. ![]() For instance, older adults tend to report less mind-wandering than do younger adults (Jackson & Balota, 2012), and we tend to mind-wander more during an easy than during a difficult task (Forster & Lavie, 2009). Recently, a field of research has emerged focusing on the concept of “mind-wandering.” The tendency to mind-wander appears to differ both between and within people. In reality, however, we may not be paying attention to what we are doing some 50% of the time (Seli, Carriere, Levene, & Smilek, 2013). In the state of flow described by Csikszentmihalyi ( 1990), both happiness and productivity are maximized. The review identifies at least 69 different methodological variants, catalogues the verbatim probes and response options used in each study, and suggests important considerations for future empirical work. Five distinct methodologies were identified: neutral (in which counterbalancing was used to equally emphasize on-task and off-task states), dichotomous (say “yes” or “no” to one thought state), dichotomous (choose between two thought states), categorical, and scale. ![]() In this review, 145 studies from 105 articles published between 20 were classified according to the framing and wording of the thought probe and response options. The most widely used method for collecting mind-wandering data-the probe-caught method-involves stopping participants during a task and asking them where their attention is directed. The state of mind-wandering is typically contrasted with being on-task, or paying attention to the task at hand, and is related to decrements in performance on cognitive tasks. In the past decade, a new field has formed to investigate the concept of mind-wandering, or task-unrelated thought. ![]()
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