ArticleCognitive research: principles and implications2023
When there is noise on Sherlock Holmes: mind wandering increases with perceptual processing difficulty during reading and listening.
Article in Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Fidgeting Increases Pupil Diameter During Auditory Processing in Young Healthy Adults.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Cortical Network Activity Associated With Different Types of Word Recognition Errors by Older Adults.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Demotivated, but still attentive: Text disfluency does not affect mind-wandering and reading comprehension, but reduces motivation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- You Can Stand Under My Umbrella: Cognitive Load in Second-Language Reading.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- A Longitudinal Framework to Describe the Relation Between Age-Related Hearing Loss and Social Isolation.Trends in hearingReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We investigated whether increased perceptual processing difficulty during reading or listening to a Sherlock Holmes novella impacts mind wandering as well as text comprehension. We presented 175 participants with a novella in either a visual or an auditory presentation format and probed their thoughts and motivational states from time to time during reading/listening. For half of the participants in each presentation-format condition (visual or auditory), the story was superimposed by Gaussian noise. For both presentation formats, the participants who were exposed to noise while processing the story mind-wandered more and performed worse in a later comprehension test than the participants who processed the story without added noise. These negative effects of increased perceptual processing difficulty on task focus and comprehension were partly driven by motivational factors: reading/listening motivation mediated the relationship between perceptual processing difficulty and mind wandering.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.