The Influence Of The Difficulty Of Chinese Reading Material And Re-reading On Mind Wandering

Mind wandering is a kind of phenomenon that we frequently experience in our daily life.When it happens,our mind always wanders outside the current tasks spontaneously and thinks about something unrelated to the current tasks.When mind wandering happens in reading,people's attention usually shifts from the reading to the information unrelated to reading spontaneously.The present study aims to explore the influence of re-reading,article difficulty and working memory capacity on mind wandering and reading comprehension during reading.Furthermore,the present study also aims to examine whether these factors have different impacts on intentional mind wandering and unintentional mind wandering.This study includes two experiments:In experiment one,58 college students were recruited as the subjects.The reading materials were filtered.It used a two-factor mixed experiment design by 3(articles difficulty:high,medium and low)× 2(working memory capacity:high and low)and explored the influence of articles difficulty and working memory capacity on frequency of mind wandering,reading comprehension and reading time.In experiment two,25 college students were recruited as the subjects.It used a two-factor mixed experiment design by 3(articles difficulty:high,medium and low)× 2(re-reading:yes,no).We discussed the influence of difficulty and re-reading on mind wandering frequency,reading comprehension and reading timeThe main conclusions of this study are as follows:First,individuals with high working memory capacity have lower wandering frequency and higher reading efficiency.The higher the article difficulty is,the higher the mind wandering frequency is.The longer the reading time is,the worse the reading comprehension is.These results support the control failure hypothesis.Second,individuals with high working memory capacity have lower unintentional mind wandering frequency when reading simple articles,however,there was no direct relationship between unintentional mind wandering and working memory capacity when reading difficult articles.Third,the frequency of intentional mind wandering is increased when re-reading the low and medium articles,however,the frequency of intentional mind wandering is not increased when re-reading the high articles.The time of re-reading is shorter,but it does not improve the scores of reading comprehension.Fourth,the subjects have higher scores of reading comprehension and lower reading speed in the condition of concentration.