Mind-wandering contents and characteristics: an exploratory study comparing between work and non-work contexts

ABSTRACT

Mind-wandering, where thoughts drift away from the immediate environment or task to self-generated thoughts, is a common human experience. Despite the growing research on its antecedents and consequences, the content and characteristics of mind-wandering across different contexts, such as work-related and non-work-related settings, remain poorly understood. This study, guided by the Context and Content Regulation Hypothesis, explores the nuances of mind-wandering by examining both its content and characteristics, such as deliberateness and temporal orientation. Over five working days, we prompted 131 workers three times daily to report the content and characteristics of their current thoughts. Our findings indicate that mind-wandering occurred less frequently during work but was predominantly populated with work-related content, regardless of the ongoing activity. Furthermore, while most mind-wandering events were future-oriented and spontaneous, those centred on work exhibited a more deliberate and pronounced future bias. Challenging the prevailing notion of mind-wandering as a mere distraction, our findings align with the Context and Content Regulation Hypothesis, emphasizing its strategic role in foreseeing and preparing for future work-related events.

KEYWORDS:

• Mind-wandering
• daydreaming
• thought content
• thought characteristics
• experience sampling

Acknowledgement

We thank Dr. Cristian Vásquez for his assistance in the codification process and the scholarship program ANID/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE 72210105.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In line with our expectation that mind-wandering is a common experience across different employment statuses and working patterns, controlling for worker status (full-time versus part-time) did not change the pattern of our findings, so we report our analyses without this variable controlled for.

2. This study received the necessary ethics approval from the Alliance Manchester Business School Panel, Research Ethics Committee (UREC), University of Manchester, with the approval number Ref: 2021–11,346–18,080.

3. For the sake of depicting the full array of responses, we included in-between-thoughts in the descriptive section.

Additional information

Funding

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, MI, upon reasonable request.