The Eye-Mind Wandering Link: Identifying Gaze Indices of Mind Wandering Across Tasks

During mind wandering, visual processing of external information is attenuated. Accordingly, mind wandering is associated with changes in gaze behaviors, albeit findings are inconsistent in the literature. This heterogeneity obfuscates a complete view of the moment-to-moment processing priorities of the visual system during mind wandering. We hypothesize that this observed heterogeneity is an effect of idiosyncrasy across tasks with varying spatial allocation demands, visual processing demands, and discourse processing demands and reflects a strategic, compensatory shift in how the visual system operates during mind wandering. We recorded eye movements and mind wandering (via thought-probes) as 132 college-aged adults completed a battery of 7 short (6 min) tasks with different visual demands. We found that for tasks requiring extensive sampling of the visual field, there were fewer fixations, and, depending on the specific task, fixations were longer and/or more dispersed. This suggests that visual sampling is sparser and potentially slower and more dispersed to compensate for the decreased sampling rate during mind wandering. For tasks that demand centrally focused gaze, mind wandering was accompanied by more exploratory eye movements, such as shorter and more dispersed fixations as well as larger saccades. Gaze behaviors were not reliably associated with mind wandering during a film comprehension task. These findings provide insight into how the visual system prioritizes external information when attention is focused inward and indicates the importance of task demands when assessing the relationship between eye movements, visual processing, and mind wandering. Public Significance Statement Efforts to study and model gaze control do not currently consider the impact of mind wandering, which obfuscates a clear understanding of how the visual system samples information across various attentional states. The current works indicates that mind-wandering-based gaze behaviors reflect shifts in gaze control that are idiosyncratic to the task-relevant visual and discourse processing demands as well as spatial allocation demands, rather than a completely generalizable principle for how the visual system operates when not avidly engaged with the external world. This work thus provides a framework for empirical investigations and models of gaze control to consider mind wandering within specific tasks parameters.