Investigating Mind-Wandering Episodes While Using Digital Technologies: An Experimental Approach Based on Mixed-Methods

In today’s fast-paced world, our brain spends almost half of our waking hours distracted from current environmental stimuli, often referred to as mind wandering in the scientific literature. At the same time, people frequently have several hours daily screen time, signifying the ubiquity of digital technologies. Here, we investigate mind wandering while using digital technologies. Measuring mind wandering (i.e., off-task thought), however, comes with challenges. In this research-in-progress paper, we present an experimental approach based on EEG, eye-tracking, questionnaires, and performance data to measure wind wandering. Our work draws upon the Unusual Uses Task, a widely used task to measure divergent thinking (as a proxy for mind wandering). We describe the experimental setup and discuss initial findings.