The Effect of Mindfulness and Cell Phone Distractions on Mind Wandering

The goal of this study is to examined factors that influence mind wandering, predicting that technology, specifically cell phone distractions, will cause a person to mind wander more and mindfulness will reduce a person’s susceptibility to mind wandering even with a technological distraction. Fifty subjects, all undergraduate students, participated in a sustained attention to response task (a go/no-go task) and had their brain waves measured using an EEG machine to look at their P300 peak, a peak related to attention. Half of participants received a phone call during the task and half did not. The participants listened to an audio clip before participating in the task, with half of participants primed with mindful breathing and the other half listened to a control audio. All participants answered self-report questions assessing mind wandering. Contrary to prediction, receiving a cell phone call decreased the amount of errors a person made on the sustained attention to response task. Also, the mindfulness prime caused a person’s P300 peak to increase between the two blocks which was contrary to the hypothesis. THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS AND CELL PHONE 3 DISTRACTIONS ON MIND WANDERING For a person to be efficient on task performance they must have sustained attention on a task and focused exclusively on the information that’s relevant while ignoring irrelevant distractions (Forster & Lavie, 2014). When people are unable to ignore irrelevant distractions and information, this is a phenomenon called mind wandering. Task performance is lowered when a person mind wanders and they are more likely to miss information while reading or in lecture. Outside distractions, like cell phones, and external factors, like concerns about homework or exams, can serve as triggers for internal distractions that cause the mind to go off-task and focus on task unrelated thoughts. It is estimated that about 50% of the time that people are awake their thoughts are wandering from in the moment to unrelated thoughts (Mooneyham & Schooler, 2013). It also disrupts a person’s ability to finish the task at hand in a successful and timely manner (Ralph, Wammes, Barr, & Smilek 2017). A person’s personal concerns and unfulfilled tasks are primary reasons why a person will mind wander from their task at hand (Mason & Reinholtz, 2015). This mind wandering to the unfulfilled tasks increases the likelihood of it being done when the opportunity presents itself (Mason et al., 2015). Although mind wandering can negatively affect a person’s performance, mindfulness can reduce a person’s chance of mind wandering. Small amounts of mindfulness can help increase a person’s well-being, and mindful activities have been shown to increase a person’s attention to the task at hand. These mindful activities include meditation training and mindful breathing exercises. THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS AND CELL PHONE 4 DISTRACTIONS ON MIND WANDERING This study aims to look at how mindful breathing affects mind wandering and keep a person on task even if external factors, like technology, are there. These external factors are ones that typically trigger mind wandering. The literature suggests that mindful breathing will reduce a person’s susceptibility to mind wander. This should still be in effect even when there are external factors that typically trigger a person to mind wander. This study will use EEG measures and behavioral measures to examine the phenomenon. Mind Wandering Mind wandering is when a person’s mind shifts from the task at hand to a more internal focus. More specifically, it’s the interruption of task focus with thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand (Mrazek, Smallwood, & Schooler, 2012). This most often occurs at rest or during tasks that are repetitive and require low cognitive demands (Galéra et al., 2012). Studies have looked at the amount of mind wandering done on activities like the SART task and found that that mind wandering is higher because it is so tedious that they tend to put their attention on the things they personally feel are more important at the time, like stress or homework. People are more likely to mind wander about tasks that they have left to do over things that they’ve already done. For example, a student is more likely to mind wander about homework that they have to do for tomorrow or their next class rather than the paper that they turned in two weeks ago. This also occurs when a person is bored, tired, or has outside distractions like technology. Mind wandering is associated with poor outcomes on tasks, especially those in education (Smallwood et al., 2015). Wammes, Boucher, Seli, Cheyne, THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS AND CELL PHONE 5 DISTRACTIONS ON MIND WANDERING and Smilek (2016) looked at how mind wandering changes across an entire semester. First, they looked at mind wandering rates over a 50 minute lecture. They then looked at how mind wandering rates change over the course of a three lecture week. While they weren’t able to find an increase in mind wandering during the 50 minute lecture, they did find a difference in mind wandering on the different days during the week. For Mondays and Fridays, students were more likely to mind wander and on Wednesdays they were more on task. This is potentially due to the fact that students on Fridays are looking forward to the weekend, on Monday they are stressed about the school week coming up, and on Wednesdays they’re more in the moment since it’s the middle of the week (Wammes, Boucher, Seli, Cheyne, & Smilek, 2016). This mind wandering during classes is important to understand since it can have a bad impact on a person’s learning and ability to recall details. The other reason it is important is because in their study, Wammes and colleagues looked at whether the mind wandering was intentional or unintentional and found that the mind wandering that occurs in lectures is typically intentional. This mind wandering could be deterred through mindfulness or through perceiving the material and performance as important (Wammes et al., 2016). Internal thoughts cause a person to mind wander, which can be dangerous depending on the circumstance (Galéra et al., 2012). A situation in which mind wandering can be dangerous is while someone is driving. Inattention while driving could contribute to over half of car crashes (Gil-Jardiné, Née, Lagarde, Schooler, Contrand, Orriols, & Galera, 2017). The factors that cause the THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS AND CELL PHONE 6 DISTRACTIONS ON MIND WANDERING inattention include cell phones, passengers, and vehicle actions like changing the radio station or adjusting the temperature in the car. Challenges in studying mind-wandering Mind wandering is a hard concept to study. Since it is an internal concept, researchers rely on self-report to study it (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). However, that’s a difficult thing to self-report since people aren’t always aware that they are mind wandering. Some studies prompt participants to think about their mind wandering as they are completing the study, giving them questions or prompts periodically throughout. Other studies use a questionnaire at the end of the study, much like the one this study will use. There are positives and negatives of using self-reports to study mind wandering. A positive is that since mind wandering is such an internal concept and researchers can’t tell when a person is mind wandering, it allows researchers to have more of a concrete idea of when people are mind wandering. However, this self-report also has negatives. One of which being people may not register when they are mind wandering so the numbers won’t be as accurate. Another negative, specifically when asking for self-report data throughout the experiment, is participants are then reminded throughout that they are being monitored on mind wandering and the results may not be as organic as they would have been had they asked at the end. In contrast, participants may not remember how much they experienced mind wandering by the end of the study since mind wandering has negative effects on memory. Along with self-report, researchers use the SART task to study mind wandering. This is a more concrete task that demonstrates when people are THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS AND CELL PHONE 7 DISTRACTIONS ON MIND WANDERING mind wandering. The SART task is administered on a computer. Participants are shown a blank screen and every second or so, depending on the test, a stimulus will appear on the screen. Participants are told to press a button every time stimuli appear and asked not to press the button when a novel stimulus appears. This task is a great way to study mind wandering since it is so tedious and simple. Each block of the task typically has approximately 360 trials, which makes this a good task to study mind wandering. Due to its simplicity and repetitiveness, errors are made when people aren’t paying attention. Therefore, it’s easy to see when people are mind wandering because they will have more errors and the variability in their response time will be greater. Neuroscience Approach to Mind Wandering EEG and ERP methods have also been used to study neural markers of mind wandering. Studies have used EEG measures, along with the SART task, to look at mind wandering. When the mind wanders, there is a decrease in the cognitive functions applied to the task at hand (Smallwood, Beach, Schooler, & Handy, 2008). By examining the P300 peak, researchers were able to see that when it was a repeated stimulus, the P300 peak was significantly reduced in comparison to the novel stimulus. When people weren’t on task, aka mind wandering, their P300 peak was reduced even for the novel stimuli. The P300 peak is defined as the most positive peak within a 200-500 ms window post a novel stimulus. Since the P300 peak is a brainwave, researchers use EEG to measure it. The P300 peak measures a person’s attention. It is activated with a novel stimulus, and is activated 2