Driven to distraction: A lack of change gives rise to mind wandering

How does the dynamic structure of the external world direct attention? We examined the relationship between event structure and attention to test the hypothesis that narrative shifts (both theoretical and perceived) negatively predict attentional lapses. Self-caught instances of mind wandering were collected while 108 participants watched a 32.5 min film called The Red Balloon. We used theoretical codings of situational change and human perceptions of event boundaries to predict mind wandering in 5-s intervals. Our findings suggest a temporal alignment between the structural dynamics of the film and mind wandering reports. Specifically, the number of situational changes and likelihood of perceiving event boundaries in the prior 0–15 s interval negatively predicted mind wandering net of low-level audiovisual features. Thus, mind wandering is less likely to occur when there is more event change, suggesting that narrative shifts keep attention from drifting inwards

Assessing connective understanding with visual and verbal tasks

.The role of temporal and causal connectives is relevant in reading comprehension. Children with comprehension difficulties have problems in interpreting these connectives (e.g. Amidon, 1976; Feagans, 1980; Pyykk\uf4nen, Niemi and J\ue4rvikivi, 2003; Trosborg, 1982). The Adaptive Learning System (ALS) TERENCE aims to develop children\u2019s comprehension through the use of adaptive visual and verbal games. Within this framework, the purpose of this study was to assess connective comprehension with three visual and verbal tasks. Two hundred and eight English and Italian children participated in this study. The main results show that the use of pictures does not always support comprehension. Moreover, less skilled children perform better at simultaneous connective \u201cwhile\u201d compared to the temporal sequential connectives (before, after) and causal (because) ones

Environment Learning from Spatial Descriptions: The Role of Perspective and Spatial Abilities in Young and Older Adults

The present study investigated age-related differences between young and older adults deriving mental representations from survey and route descriptions, and the involvement of spatial skills in their representation. A sample of 34 young (aged 20-30), 34 middle-aged (50-60) and 32 older (61-80) adults listened to survey and route descriptions of an environment and their recall was tested with a free recall task, a verification test, and a map drawing task; several spatial measures were also administered. The results showed that: i) middle-aged and older adults performed worse than young adults in all recall tasks; ii) all participants formed a perspective-dependent mental representation after learning a route description, but not after learning a survey description (as shown by the verification test); iii) age and spatial abilities predicted recall performance (in relation to type of task and the perspective learnt). Overall, spatial perspective and spatial skills influence the construction of environment representations in young, middle-aged and older adults