Are the correlates of mind wandering consistent across younger and older adults?

The correlates of mind wandering are well studied in younger adult samples. However, little is known about the correlates of mind wandering among older adults. The current study took a comprehensive approach to investigating age-related differences in the correlates of mind wandering. Participants (N = 150 younger and N = 150 older adults) completed a series of attention tasks. During some of these tasks, participants were periodically probed to report on their mind wandering experiences. Additionally, participants completed several questionnaires capturing theoretically relevant constructs such as motivation, affect, and dispositional factors. We used confirmatory factor analysis to assess correlations between our predictors and mind wandering at the construct level. We found that some factors (e.g., task-based motivation) were significantly correlated in both age groups, while other factors were significant correlates in one age group but not the other. Despite these apparent differences, many of the correlations did not statistically differ across the groups. We did find, however, that the association between behavioral attention lapses and mind wandering was significantly stronger in younger adults compared to older adults. A secondary aim of the current study was to replicate and extend prior work examining the mediating factors in the age-mind wandering relationship. Consistent with prior findings, we showed that motivational and affective factors only partially mediated the relationship between age and mind wandering. Our findings can help inform and refine theories of mind wandering by showing that key predictors of mind wandering are largely consistent across younger and older adults.