The Relationship Between Visual Working Memory Capacity And Mind Wandering

Visual working memory(VWM)is a short-time storage system with limited capacity,which is mainly responsible for processing and storing visual information.In life,people can't remember the color and orientation of an object without the help of VWM,therefore,it is also the focus of cognitive psychology.Mind Wandering(MW)refers to when attention detaches from the current main tasks or external tasks,and spontaneously generates some internal thoughts,imagination and experience that are not related to the current tasks.Because of the universality of MW and the endogenous characteristics of the content of MW,it has been paid more attention until recently at home and abroad.Although previous studies have focused on working memory,however,no consistent conclusion had been found in the relationship between working memory and MW.Besides,fewever researchers have noticed or explored the relationship between VWM and MW.As we know,VWM as a subsystem of working memory,which is important for processing and storing visual and spatial information,therefore,we suspect that there may be relationship between VWM and MW and this relationship may share similarities and differences with the relationship between WM and MW.In this study,four experiments were carried out to explore the relationship between VWM and MW.In experiment one,we investigated participants' visual working memory capacity(VWMC),NEO-FFI score,MW frequencies and emotional state in SART(Sustained Attention to Response)tasks on five consecutive days,however,the results indicated that there were no significant correlations between VWMC and MW.In addition to this key point,experiment one showed that participants' everyday MW frequency is stable by keeping in about 40%;The results of the NEO-FFI indicated that the higher the score in conscious subscale,the lower the frequency of MW,and people with higher score in neurotic subscale have been found higher in intentional MW frequency;In this study,participants' emotion changes didn't have a stable influence on MW frequency;Besides,the higher the attention level in task,the lower the frequency of MW and the higher the motivation degree in task,the lower the frequency of MW and people with higher sober degree would MW less.In experiment two,we directly insert mind probes into the two kinds of visual working memory tasks to measure the frequency of MW.In this way,we hope to detect whether the frequency of MW in visual working memory tasks was related to their VWMC.However,the results showed that there were no significant correlations between the individuals' VWMC and their corresponding MW frequencies under the two task paradigms.By analyzing task performances of positions before and after mind probes in the experiment,we found that compared to positions before probes,individuals' task performance had a significant improvement for postions after probes when people reported MW on the probe.In order to explore whether different cognitive load conditions neutralized the influence of VWMC on the frequency of MW,we conducted experiment three.In experiment three,mind probes were inserted into visual working memory tasks which were under block design,by this means,we want to investigate the relationship between VWMC and MW under various cognitive load conditions.Unfortunately,the results again indicated that there were no significant correlations between individuals' VWMC and their MW frequency.However,when we divided individual' VWMC(k)into two parts,the results showed that while the lower k group reported higher MW frequencies in high load conditions compared to low load conditions,the higher k group reported similiar MW frequencies under four different load conditions.Futhermore,mind probes' promotional effect on postions after probes when individual reported MW on the probe in experiment three were same as experiment two,and we found the promotional effect of probes mainly in correct rate were more significant under middle load conditions.In addition,experiment three showed that the length of time in task and the degree of task diffculties had significant influences on MW frequency,which means that the longer the devoted time in task,the higher the frequency of MW and the greater the difficulty of task,the higher the frequency of MW.Besides,expriment three tells us that different VWMC individuals have different MW frequencies under different experimental stages and different cognitive loads.Based on the results of experiment three,we speculate that the relationship between visual working memory capacity and MW frequency may be influenced by cognitive load conditions and time.Therefore,we take a experiment four to check the results of experiment three.In experiment four,we measured individuals' MW frequency through visual search task,and in the meantime we surved individuals' VWMC and operation score.As a result,like the previous experiments,there were no significant correlations between VWMC and MW frequency.However,when we set a criterion on the accuracy of equation which is a part of operation span task,such as 75 percent,at this point,we found a significant positive correlation between individuals' VWMC and MW frequency,especially under low load conditions.Based on these results,we speculate that individuals' performance on operation task may influence the relationship between VWMC and their MW frequency.And this means the two componets of working memory: visuospatial sketchpad and the central executive may joint influence individuals' MW frequency,at least influence their MW frequency in visual search task.Futhermore,according to the aforementioned results in experiment four,we found they mainly support the perceptual decoupling hypothesis,which means individuals with more cognitive resources will have a higher MW frequency.However,inconsistent with experiment two and three,the alert funtion of mind probes in experiment four of visual search task is not obvious.But like experiment three,the length of time and the degree of difficulties' still had significant influences on MW frequency.In conclusion,certain relationship may exists between VWMC and MW frequency.And this kind of relationship may be affected by both individuals' performance in operation span task and the conditions of cognitive load,besides,with the increase of experimental time,that relationship may show different characteristics.To be specific,when individual have a higher accuracy on the operation span task,and in this case if their VWMC are lager,their MW frequency will be higher,and this result support the perceptual decoupling hypothesis.