ArticlePsychological research2022
Mind wandering increases linearly with text difficulty.
Article in Psychological research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The relationship between mind wandering and reading comprehension: A meta-analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Pooled it
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Mind wandering during first- and foreign-language reading.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Demotivated, but still attentive: Text disfluency does not affect mind-wandering and reading comprehension, but reduces motivation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Extending homeostasis to thought dynamics for a comprehensive explanation of mind-wandering.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- The effect of workload on mind-wandering of drilling operators measured by electroencephalography (EEG).Experimental brain research · 2024Article
- The role of focus back effort in the relationships among motivation, interest, and mind wandering: an individual difference perspective.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- When there is noise on Sherlock Holmes: mind wandering increases with perceptual processing difficulty during reading and listening.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Although mind wandering during reading is known to be affected by text difficulty, the nature of this relationship is not yet fully understood. To examine this issue, we conducted an experiment in which participants read non-fiction texts that varied along five levels of difficulty under naturalistic conditions. Difficulty levels were determined based on Flesch-Kincaid Grade Levels and verified with Coh-Metrix indices. Mind wandering was measured with thought probes. We predicted that text difficulty and mind wandering have a U-shaped (i.e., quadratic) relationship. Contrary to our expectations, but in line with some prior studies, mind wandering linearly increased with text difficulty. Additionally, text interest moderated the effect of text difficulty on mind wandering. Finally, mind wandering was associated with worse performance on a comprehension test. Together, our findings extend previous work by showing that (a) a linear relationship between difficulty and mind wandering exists during common page-by-page reading of pre-existing texts and that (b) this relationship holds across a broad range of difficulty levels.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.