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Updated: Feb 22, 2026

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control
Published on: July 5, 2015
Increasing participant motivation reduces rates of intentional and unintentional mind wandering
Paul Seli1, Daniel L Schacter2, Evan F Risko3
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA. paulseli@fas.harvard.edu.
Abstract:
We explored the possibility that increasing participants' motivation to perform well on a focal task can reduce mind wandering. Participants completed a sustained-attention task either with standard instructions (normal motivation), or with instructions informing them that they could be excused from the experiment early if they achieved a certain level of performance (higher motivation). Throughout the task, we assessed rates of mind wandering (both intentional and unintentional types) via thought probes. Results showed that the motivation manipulation led to significant reductions in both intentional and unintentional mind wandering as well as improvements in task performance. Most critically, we found that our simple motivation manipulation led to a dramatic reduction in probe-caught mind-wandering rates (49%) compared to a control condition (67%), which suggests the utility of motivation-based methods to reduce people's propensity to mind-wander.
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