Refixation patterns of mind-wandering during real-world scene perception

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Mind-wandering (MW) is linked to altered eye movement patterns.
• The sequential dynamics of eye movements during MW remain underexplored.
• Understanding these dynamics may offer insights into cognitive processing failures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how mind-wandering affects the sequential patterns of eye movements during complex visual scene encoding.
• To utilize Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) to quantify refixation patterns during MW.
• To correlate eye movement changes with memory performance and MW types.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a scene encoding task while eye movements were tracked.
• Thought probes assessed intentional and unintentional mind-wandering.
• Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) analyzed scanpath repetitiveness and fixation sequences.
• Traditional eye movement metrics (fixation count, duration, blink rate) were also measured.

Main Results:

• Both intentional and unintentional MW were associated with poorer memory recall.
• Unintentional MW led to more repetitive scanpaths, characterized by higher recurrence rates and stereotypical fixation sequences.
• This increased repetitiveness correlated with focusing on smaller spatial scales of stimuli.
• Fewer and longer fixations were observed during both MW types; blink rates increased significantly during unintentional MW.

Conclusions:

• Mind-wandering, particularly unintentional MW, alters the sequential dynamics of visual exploration.
• Increased scanpath repetitiveness during unintentional MW may represent an adaptive strategy to re-examine information.
• The findings highlight the importance of analyzing the temporal sequence of eye movements to understand cognitive states like MW.