Capturing Dynamic Fluctuations in Remembered Momentary Attentional States

Abstract

States of attention such as engagement and mind-wandering fluctuate dynamically over time. Although aggregate retrospective reports of attention have been used in prior research, the full nature of people’s remembered momentary attentional states (RMASs) – i.e., how attentive they were at a specific moment in time – remains largely unexplored. Across two experiments, participants (NE1 = 102, NE2 = 97) watched online video lectures while being intermittently probed to report their subjective levels of attentional engagement (E1) or mind-wandering (E2). After watching the lecture, participants were then presented with short excerpts from it and were asked to recall their level of attentional engagement or mind-wandering when they initially watched the excerpt within the lecture. When reporting on attentional engagement (E1), cross-correlation analyses revealed concordance between the temporal dynamics of participants’ in-the-moment and retrospective ratings. However, when reporting on mind-wandering (E2), there was only concordance for videos that were considered less engaging. Contrasts across experiments revealed that the overlap between in-the-moment and retrospective ratings were significantly lower when participants reported mind-wandering compared to attentional engagement. Together, our findings suggest that people may have enduring RMASs for general attentional engagement but less-robust memories for the specific experience of mind-wandering.