A Study On How People’s Wandering Mind Improve Their Solving The Complex Problems

Mind wandering (MW), often referred to as daydreaming, or distraction, is a ubiquitous psychological phenomenon in daily life. Traditionally, MW was considered as a kind of negative experience.However, recent studies revealed that MW is not a completely uncontrollable or dispersive process, and it possesses many adaptive functions, especially in dealing with some unconventional problems, such as creative problems.Complex problem is another kind of unconventional problem, in which the most distinctive feature is that individual must process so much information when solving these problems that the quantity of information surpass his/her working memory capacity. Studies on complex problems indicated that participants did better when they were required to conduct some dull task after the content of problems were presented than when they were provided some time to think it over. And this phenomenon was called the deliberation without attention effect, which was usually explained as a result of unconscious thought. Unconscious thought which occurred in the distracting task, was thought to have advantage in processing excessive information, so the deliberation without attention effect is also called the unconscious thought effect.However, no clear definition has been made about what is the unconscious thought, without any research demonstrating the unconscious thought as the sore factor that could influence the complex problem solving. Therefore, we proposed that the deliberation without attention effect was a mixture of many psychological process, with MW as an important element of it.Our studied contained three research. The first research replicated the deliberation without attention effect under the background of Chinese culture, through which we obtained test materials suitable for Chinese undergraduate. Based on the result of the first research, the second research exam whether MW could facilitate complex problems solving. The third research explore the relationship between MW and unconscious thought.Our conclusion was summarized as follow:MW could facilitate the solving of complex problems;MW related to the complex problems improved unconscious thought so as to facilitate the solving of complex problems; MW unrelated to the complex problems not improving unconscious thought, but facilitate the solving of complex problems through other channel.