Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Jun 2015
Can research participants comment authoritatively on the validity of their self-reports of mind wandering and task engagement?
The study of mind wandering rests upon the assumption that people are able to consistently and accurately introspect and report on these sorts of mental experiences. Although there is some initial evidence that people can indeed accurately report on the subjective experience of mind wandering, to date, no work has directly examined people's degree of confidence in their self-reports of mind wandering and the effects that confidence has on the accuracy of such reports. ⋯ This study yielded 3 key findings: We found substantial between- and within-subject variability in both (a) reported mind wandering and (b) confidence in mind-wandering reports, and, most critically, (c) we found that the relation of reported mind wandering and task performance varied as a function of confidence. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of the literature on mind wandering.
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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Jun 2015
Auditory temporal preparation induced by rhythmic cues during concurrent auditory working memory tasks.
The present study investigated whether participants can develop temporal preparation driven by auditory isochronous rhythms when concurrently performing an auditory working memory (WM) task. In Experiment 1, participants had to respond to an auditory target presented after a regular or an irregular sequence of auditory stimuli while concurrently performing a Sternberg-type WM task. Results showed that participants responded faster after regular compared with irregular rhythms and that this effect was not affected by WM load; however, the lack of a significant main effect of WM load made it difficult to draw any conclusion regarding the influence of the dual-task manipulation in Experiment 1. ⋯ However, such interference did not affect temporal preparation induced by rhythms, with faster RTs after regular than after irregular sequences in the high-load and low-load conditions. These results revealed that secondary tasks demanding memory updating, relative to tasks just demanding rehearsal, produced larger interference effects on overall RTs in the auditory rhythm task. Nevertheless, rhythm regularity exerted a strong temporal preparation effect that survived the interference of the WM task even when both tasks competed for processing resources within the auditory modality.