How Epistemic Affects, Curiosity, and Personality Are Associated With Mind Wandering: Evidence from a Health-related Three-Armed Bandit Task
Objectives. This study investigated how mind wandering thoughts, and specifically the content of these thoughts, are associated with epistemic affects (i.e., epistemic emotions and epistemic feelings), trait curiosity, and personality in the context of an information search and comprehension task involving health-related questions and a three-armed bandit design. Studies have demonstrated that mind wandering is influenced by a range of cognitive measures; however, its relationship with epistemic affects, especially with regard to thought content, has not been investigated. Moreover, while previous studies have shown that trait curiosity and personality are related to mind wandering, none have investigated how these constructs influence the content of mind wandering thoughts. The goal of this study was to improve the current understanding on these gaps in knowledge. Methods. The study collected data on mind wandering and epistemic affects under a contextual bandit task design in which 52 participants answered a series of health-related questions. As part of the contextual bandit design, participants could draw information statements that may help with answering the question from three information sources that varied in scientific quality and relevance (which was not identified to them). The participants also reported on epistemic affects throughout the task, where familiarity with the topic was reported for each question, while usefulness, confidence in usefulness, clarity, and curiosity were reported for each information statement drawn. In a second online session, the study also collected data on various cognitive measures, including the five-dimensional curiosity and Big Five personality traits. Results and conclusions. The data analysis showed for the first time that epistemic affects are, in fact, deeply implicated in the kind of mind wandering thoughts a participant might experience (with effect sizes of around 0.2 SDs). In particular, it was found that when all the epistemic affects towards the task were high (familiarity, usefulness, confidence, clarity, and curiosity), participants would experience a mind wandering characterized by intentionality, positive emotions, and task related topics (also called ‘mind wondering’ by Schooler et al. 2024). In contrast, the absence of two particular affects, usefulness and clarity, was associated with mind wandering on non-task related topics. The study also showed that, in the context of a bandit task, a preference for an exploration strategy was negatively associated with on-task thoughts with positive emotions – indicating a possible lack of strong cognitive engagement with the task. Other novel findings include on-task-positive-emotion thoughts’ positive association with joyous exploration dimension and negative association with thrill-seeking dimension, as well as topic-ambiguous detailed verbal thoughts' positive association with stress tolerance dimension (of curiosity). The study also complicates the existing understanding of the relationship between personality and mind wandering by accounting for thought content and establishing its importance as a key variable.
Mind Wandering, Epistemic Emotions, Epistemic Feelings, Affects, Trait Curiosity, Personality, Mind Wondering, Mind Wandering Thought Content, Positive On-task Deliberate mind wandering
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