No room for daydreaming: harnessing the ever-wandering mind
9 June 2009
Professor Nilli Lavie at University College London believes the key lies in the demands placed on our perceptual load capacity (the amount of space we have devoted to attention): the more this capacity is utilised, the less scope there is for daydreaming. She calls this the "load theory of attention".
To test this theory, Professor Lavie and colleague Sophie Forster set a task for a group of 24 volunteers. They were repeatedly shown combinations of six letters arranged in a circle and were asked to press '0' if they saw the letter X and press '2' if they saw the letter N.
The experiment was conducted under two conditions. In the first, known as a 'low load condition', each non-target letter was a lower-case o; in the second, more challenging 'high load condition', the non-targets were a range of other angular letters (as X and N are), such as K, M, Z and W.
In both experiments, the volunteers were occasionally interrupted and asked whether they had been thinking about the task, for example "Did I get that one right?" or "I wonder what the next letter will be", or whether their thoughts were unrelated, such as "I must buy some milk on the way home tonight" or "I wonder if swine flu really will become a pandemic".
The results of the experiment are published in the journal 'Cognition'. As expected, the speed at which the volunteers spotted the target letters became slower under the high load condition and the participants were prone to more mistakes. However, the amount of irrelevant thoughts fell by around 20 per cent, suggesting that they were more focused on the task.
"When people perform tasks that are dull - and unfortunately many of our daily jobs are monotonous - they engage in a lot of mind wandering," says Professor Lavie. "In fact, when the task was less challenging, we found their minds had wandered off well over half the time, even when the task lasted less than an hour. This can lead to reduced efficiency at work or even potentially dangerous accidents."
Professor Lavie believes that the results of the experiment make sense within the load theory of attention, which suggests that we have limited capacity to process information: if the task we are performing engages most of this capacity, then we have none left for the extra information processing necessary for daydreaming.
The findings could also explain why it is easier to focus on a lecturer who complements his or her talk with a slide presentation or on a teacher who uses visually stimulating props and materials to illustrate a lesson.
"If you want to engage the mind, you have to engage the mind's eye," explains Professor Lavie. "The more we have to demand our attention, the less likely we are to get distracted."
Image: Students at a lecture. Credit: Goodimages on Flickr
Contact
Craig Brierley
Senior Media Officer
Wellcome Trust
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c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
Notes for editors
1. Forster S, Lavie N. Harnessing the wandering mind: the role of perceptual load. Cognition 2009;111(3):345-55.
2. The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.
3. University College London - Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. UCL is the seventh-ranked university in the 2008 THES-QS World University Rankings, and the third-ranked UK university in the 2008 league table of the top 500 world universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. UCL alumni include Marie Stopes, Jonathan Dimbleby, Lord Woolf, Alexander Graham Bell, and members of the band Coldplay. UCL currently has over 12 000 undergraduate and 8000 postgraduate students. Its annual income is over £600 million.