The Effects of Mindfulness on Mind Wandering: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

Mind wandering is a pervasive phenomenon, accounting for as much as 50% of the total waking lifespan. While not necessarily harmful, in a context where one engages in an attentionally demanding task, mind wandering can be costly. Preliminary studies have shown that mindfulness can reduce the number of mind wandering episodes. There is less evidence, however, for how mindfulness affects mind wandering episodes themselves. This is mostly due to mind wandering being treated as a dichotomy: either attention is decoupled from the external environment or it is not. In this study, we use eye-tracking to pilot a method for investigating mind wandering in a continuous, rather than binary, manner. Subsequently, we measure how mindfulness affects the intensity of mind wandering episodes. Six university students completed a reading task and had to report whether they were mind-wandering every time a probe popped up. Prior to the task, participants in the mindfulness group had to go through a 10-minute audio-based guided meditation. Eye-tracking was used to analyze 10 seconds of eye movements prior to when participants indicated that they were mind wandering. It was found that eye movement behaviours typical for mind wandering episodes (prolonged fixation duration and decreased fixation count) were generally lesser for mind wandering episodes of participants in the mindfulness condition compared to the control condition.