The Relationship Between Mental Wandering, Working Memory And Its Influence On Reading Comprehension

Mind wandering refers to a kind of non autonomous endogenous consciousness experience,which is caused by the internal reason of the individual.It is a kind of special attention to the dispersion state.In the state of mind wandering,people take part or all of the attention resources allocated to internal feeling and experience,and unable to concentrate on the task,resulting in certain interference effect on task results.Most people have had similar experience in reading magazine articles,the complete irrelevant information or pictures about the reading content suddenly flashed in the mind,and little impression about the contents of the article is reserved or understood;when watching TV,the brain sometimes automatically thinks of some independent story plot,so the viewer missed something.It involves the inhibition,capacity working memory capacity and central executive system's ability.What is the relationship between mind wandering and reading comprehension,how they impact two types reading comprehension,which is the paper intends to discuss.The study includes three parts,the junior high school students,high school and college students make up three groups of subjects.They were tested the mind wandering,working memory span,in order to compare and explore the inhibitory control of two kinds reading style,and further analyzing the moderating effect of state and trait mind wandering in the memory span and two kinds of reading comprehension.The research adopts the “mind wandering frequency questionnaire” to investigate the subjects' state of mind wandering to know three groups subjects' occurrence of mind wandering in daily life;then using SART(the Sustained Attention to Response Task)to test mind wandering subjective and objective indicators,the Stroop color word judgment task is used to test the inhibitory control ability.Due to the reading scores,the memory span test uses verbal memory span.The study chooses the “Chinese reading level measure(1)revised edition” Vol.five part wrote by Mo Lei,which includes two articles(one scientific exposition,one scene of prose)and the corresponding reading comprehension as the reading test questions.To compare the grade variables by correlation analysis,variance analysis,t test methods,through statistical analysis,the following conclusions are listed:(1)Mind wandering frequency scale and the sustained attention task(SART)measures mind wandering from different angles,there is a significant relationship between the individual's occurence of mind wandering in real life and experimental conditions.(2)In the different grades groups,the effect of mind wandering and memory span on the different styles of reading performance is not similar.The mind wandering frequency in the junior high school students between working memory span and prose scores is a regulatory role.The mind wandering subjective indicators between working memory span and expository scores has modulation effect.(3)Mind wandering frequency has significant influence on prose reading scores in different grades,but it has little influence on expository reading results.(4)Mind wandering has a negative effect on inhibitory control ability.(5)Mind wandering,working memory span,inhibitory control and reading comprehension scores of students in different grades have significant difference,with the increase of grades they generally tend to rise,and the difference between junior high school and high school students is generally higher than the difference between high school and college students.