When the wandering mind trips: Attentional fluctuations influence memory for temporal structure of experience

By drawing attention away from environmental stimuli, mind-wandering may disrupt encoding of sensory information and segmentation of ongoing experiences into discrete events. However, relatively little is known about its consequences for the formation and later recall of temporally structured event memories. To investigate how mind-wandering influences temporal memory, we adapted the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) paradigm to give it episodic structure (“EpiSART”). By presenting participants with a continuous series of visual objects and periodically switching the category of these object stimuli to induce event boundaries, we were able to examine the influence of event boundaries on response time variability, a marker of mind-wandering. Across four experiments, we found a significant change in the slope of the response time variance time course (VTC) before versus after an event boundary, with the former having a positive slope (increasing mind-wandering) and the latter having a negative slope (reduction in mind-wandering). Critically, the degree to which participants redirected their focus, indexed by a reduction in the VTC, after an event boundary (Experiment 1 and 2) or after making an error (Experiment 3) predicted subsequent memory for the temporal order of events. However, when task demands increased, and mind-wandering consequently decreased, changes in VTC slope at these critical time points had no relationship with subsequent temporal order memory (Experiment 4). Taken together, these results suggest that event boundaries and errors serve to momentarily reduce mind-wandering in a manner that is consequential for temporal memory.