Mind Wandering 1

Mind Wandering: Does Mind Wandering Affect Test Score?

Nicholas Hinh

PSYCH 457 002

Dr. Kevin Miller

April 26, 2021

Mind Wandering 2

Abstract

Distractions and mind wandering are typically associated with poorer performance due to

not paying attention to the material before individuals. Mind wandering alone can also

encompass many different aspects within it. People might mind wander at specific times that will

not hurt their performance since it might not be at critical points for encoding material. It’s

reasonable to state that mind wandering will overlap with at least one critical point in the lecture,

so the participants should do worse if they mind wander more. We also surveyed people to see

how well they judged their own mind wandering depending on if the lecture was online or

in-person and found that people have a significantly lower level of attention in class on Zoom

than in-person. The video was also structured in a way that the slides in the video were more

busy during the first lecture video compared to the second video. In another group, it was flipped

so the participants found the first video to be not busy compared to the second. The groups for

this variable were chosen at random. We thought that busier slides would hold the participants

attention more than the unbusy slides thus would also lower mind wandering for participants

looking at the busy slides. We want to identify if mind wandering leads to worse performance or

not, thus we test whether or not people would do worse on tests if they mind wandered more

during a video or not. We found that mind wandering had no correlation to how the individuals

performed on the following test given after they watched the video.
Mind Wandering 3

Intro

One of the difficulties in classes is being able to hold attention, and so we want to see

how much mind wandering can affect students in retaining information and doing well on

following quizzes and tests. Identifying how much mind wandering can determine how much

effort we can put in to help students lessen mind wandering or not. Smallwood, Fishman, &

Schooler discussed how mind wandering is harmful to learning since it interrupts the learning

process. At the first level, inattention leads to failure in identification of the task which leads to

superficial encoding and an impaired model (2007). This is the reason why we think that the

participants will do worse on the quiz after the video if they mind wandered more during the

video. There could also be points in time that are more important to pay attention to. According

to Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, they found that it was imperative that there are critical

points that the participant has to pay attention to in order to build the mental model when they

read (2008). While some participants may have mastered when the most important parts are to

not mind wander, it still seems that it’s more plausible that one of their mind wandering instances

would hit a critical point. This is why we estimate that the participants will do worse on the quiz

if they report themselves mind wandering more during the video.

Looking at another area of interest, we also looked how the participants viewed their

mind wandering in online vs in-person scenarios. Looking at the study that Hollis and Was did,

they looked at how technology was a distraction during in-person lectures (2016). While they

didn’t look at online lectures, it does give insight to how much technology has an impact as a

distraction in lectures. Hollis and Was state that 29% of mind wandering in lectures was due to

technology (2016). While mind wandering was only looked at in in-person lectures, we can

assume that technology would be much more available to students during an online lecture which
Mind Wandering 4

would be a much greater distraction to them. Some in-person lectures ban the use of technology,

so naturally there would be a lower amount of potential distractions in in-person lectures.

Because of this, we expect that students report having mind wandering less during in-person

lectures than on Zoom.

Lastly, we looked at how busy and unbusy slides during a lecture can affect the

participants’ mind wandering. We estimate that if the slides are more busy, the participants will

have to take more time and effort to take in all the information on the slides thus leaving less

time to mind wander. If the slides are not as busy, then the participants will take less time to

gather all the data on the slides and thus have more time to mind wander. Because of this, we

expect the participants to mind wander more on the unbusy slides and less on the busy slides.

Methods

We conducted a survey where a total of 10 University of Michigan students taking a

methods course answered questions based on a video they watched. They were first asked what

would count as mind wandering so a baseline can be set so the participants know what counts as

mind wandering. This is for a later question where they were asked at what times they mind

wandered during the videos. Next, the participants were given a 4 minute video, then afterwards

given 5 questions about the content in the video they watched. The participants then got another

8 minute video with another 5 questions after they finished the video. At the end of the survey,

they were also asked how much time they spent mind wandering online vs in-person classes.

They were also asked how they judged their own mind wandering compared to other people. The

lecture video and slides also contained differing levels of busy slides intended to test whether or

not the participants mind wander more in one scenario over the other. One group was given a
Mind Wandering 5

video with busy slides at first, then the second video had slides that weren’t as busy. The other

group saw it the other way around with unbusy slides first and busy slides second. These two

groups were chosen at random.

Results

There is a correlation of .095 between the amount of time the participants mind

wandered and how well they performed on the quizzes which means that there is no correlation

between frequency of mind wandering and performance. For the Zoom vs in-person class

attention, a paired-sample t-test comparing self-reported attention on Zoom vs. in-person classes

found a significantly lower level of attention when class is on Zoom (t(9) = -4.4385, p < .01). At

the same time, there was a strong correlation between the percent of time an individual

self-reported they were paying attention in these two formats (r(8) = .809, p < .01). For the test

of mind wandering based on how busy the slides are, there is a difference in mind wandering but

not significant. A one-way ANOVA of self-reported Mind Wandering in Quiz one found no

significant difference (F(1,8) = 0.054, n.s.). A one-way ANOVA of self-reported Mind

Wandering in Quiz 2 found no significant difference (F(1,8) = 0.557, n.s.).

Discussion

We found that there is no correlation between how many times the participants self

reported mind wandering and how well they did in the quiz following the videos. Since our

hypothesis was that the participants would do worse on the quiz if mind wandered more, we

reject the hypothesis. There are a few reasons that we can address as to why we have gotten the

results we have. One reason is that the sample size is too small to display accurate information.
Mind Wandering 6

The participant who only mind wandered once did the best on the quizzes overall (9/10 correct)

while the participant who did the worst (5/10 correct) did mind wander more. Since these are

only 2 data points from the 10, it’s not indicative at all of what the overall data shows, but this

might mean that we need more data points to paint a more accurate image.

Another reason why mind wandering and performance might not be correlated is that the

students know when to pay attention and when it is fine to mind wander for a short amount of

time. Since the questionnaire the participants were given were to ask at which times they mind

wandered, we don’t know how long the participants spent mind wandering at the moment in

time. They might have mind wandered for a short or long amount of time and at points in video

where it may or may not have mattered if they did pay attention. According to Smallwood,

McSpadden, & Schooler, if the participants didn’t mind wander at a critical point in the video,

they can still pick up all the information they need to learn the information and thus do well on

the quiz following the video (2008).

One of the factors that contribute to mind wandering the most is technology. Hollis and

Was state that the technology contributes to distractions in classrooms (2016). By extending this

idea, we can assume that with the technology much more readily available in online classes,

there is a greater chance that mind wandering occurs more frequently in an online environment

than in-person. They also state that multitasking led to having difficulty attending to the essential

information and switching tasks (2016). These factors make it much more difficult to maintain

attention to the lecture online whereas the distractions aren’t as available to students during

in-person lectures. Since some lectures ban the use of technology, students would mind wander

less due to the lack of technology. While technology isn’t the only factor, using or thinking about

technology accounts for about 29% of all mind wandering, so banning the use of technology in
Mind Wandering 7

in-person lectures would reduce mind wandering (Hollis & Was, 2016). In the studye found that

students self reported mind wandering more during Zoom lectures than in-person lectures.

Conclusion

We reject our hypothesis that mind wandering is negatively correlated with test

performance. In our study, mind wandering and test performance had no correlation. We tried to

mimic a lecture in which the participants would watch a video lecture and take a test to see if

they retained the information and how much they mind wandered during the video. This was to

see how much mind wandering would affect students in a classroom in terms of how much

information they learned from lectures. While a lack of attention would lead to not being able to

encode the information, it seems that other factors such as when the participants mind wandered

and for how long might also affect their performance. Further studies can be done to see how

much these factors affect performance compared to the frequency of mind wandering during a

lecture or lecture video.

References:

Hollis, R. B., & Was, C. A. (2016). Mind wandering, control failures, and social media

distractions in online learning. Learning and Instruction, 42, 104–112.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.01.007

Smallwood, J., Fishman, D. J., & Schooler, J. W. (2007). Counting the cost of an absent mind:

Mind wandering as an underrecognized influence on educational performance.

Mind Wandering 8

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(2), 230–236. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03194057

Smallwood, J., McSpadden, M., & Schooler, J. W. (2008). When attention matters: The curious

incident of the wandering mind. Memory & Cognition, 36(6), 1144–1150.

https://doi.org/10.3758/mc.36.6.1144

Figure 1. This graph shows how well participants performed on quizzes compared to how many
times they mind wandered during the video lectures.
Mind Wandering 9
Mind Wandering
10

Figure 2. This graph shows the participants self judgment on how much they pay attention in
in-person classes.
Mind Wandering
11

Figure 3. This graph shows the participants self judgment on how much they pay attention in
online Zoom classes.
Mind Wandering
12
Mind Wandering
13