Mind Wandering And Learning: An Argumentative Analysis

The mental activity of mind wandering has been a significant topic in cognitive psychology, as it seems to be a challenge to education. Mind wandering is an unconscious behaviour where the mind is pre-occupied with unrelated thoughts, influencing attention on current tasks. A constantly growing theoretical framework has developed research concerning the cognitive and neural basis of the phenomenon by introducing reliable experimental procedures (Smallwood, 2013). The experimental procedures have tested educational contexts for clear demonstration of the impact mind wandering has on learning in higher education (Dunlosky et al., 2013). It has been estimated that this failure of cognitive control occurs during 50% of our waking hours (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010), therefore it is clearly a highly influential mental activity. This essay will discuss the cognitive processes that are affected by mind wandering, including reading comprehension, attentiveness, memory, quality of note taking and retention. Specifically it will discuss influences that trigger mind wandering such as fidgeting, time and topic interest and how the whole concept of mind wandering affects learning. It will also discuss creative thinking and future thinking which are the main benefits of mind wandering. The correlations …show more content…
Towards the later stages of the lecture, it is expected that mind wandering intervals would increase rapidly. Johnstone and Percival (1976) conducted a study focusing on attentiveness by observing physical signs of inattention. During a chemistry lecture, the researchers recorded any signs that demonstrated that students were disengaged from the learning content. Results indicated that students started to engage in unrelated thought around 10-18 minutes of the lecture. There was then a rapid increase to every 3-4 minutes, which occurred towards the end of the