Refixation Patterns of Mind-wandering during Real-world Scene Perception

Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processing during MW. The current study used Recurrence Quantification Analysis (Anderson, Bischof, Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013) to describe the pattern of refixations (fixations directed to previously-inspected regions) during MW. Participants completed a real-world scene encoding task and responded to thought probes assessing intentional and unintentional MW. Both types of MW were associated with worse memory of the scenes. Importantly, RQA showed that scanpaths during unintentional MW were more repetitive than during on-task episodes, as indicated by a higher recurrence rate and more stereotypical fixation sequences. This increased repetitiveness suggests an adaptive response to processing failures through re-examining previous locations. Moreover, this increased repetitiveness contributed to fixations focusing on a smaller spatial scale of the stimuli. Finally, we were also able to validate several traditional measures: both intentional and unintentional MW were associated with fewer and longer fixations; Eye-blinking increased numerically during both types of MW but the difference was only significant for unintentional MW. Overall, the results advanced our understanding of how visual processing is affected during MW by highlighting the sequential aspect of eye movements.