title: A resource-control account of sustained attention: evidence from mind-wandering and vigilance paradigms.
abstract: Staying attentive is challenging enough when carrying out everyday tasks, such as reading or sitting through a lecture, and failures to do so can be frustrating and inconvenient. However, such lapses may even be life threatening, for example, if a pilot fails to monitor an oil-pressure gauge or if a long-haul truck driver fails to notice a car in his or her blind spot. Here, we explore two explanations of sustained-attention lapses. By one account, task monotony leads to an increasing preoccupation with internal thought (i.e., mind wandering). By another, task demands result in the depletion of information-processing resources that are needed to perform the task. A review of the sustained-attention literature suggests that neither theory, on its own, adequately explains the full range of findings. We propose a novel framework to explain why attention lapses as a function of time-on-task by combining aspects of two different theories of mind wandering: attentional resource (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) and control failure (McVay & Kane, 2010). We then use our "resource-control" theory to explain performance decrements in sustained-attention tasks. We end by making some explicit predictions regarding mind wandering in general and sustained-attention performance in particular.
authors.affiliation: University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada d5thomso@uwaterloo.ca.
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Thomson
authors.affiliation: University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Derek
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Besner
authors.affiliation: University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Smilek
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological
keywords: attentional resources; executive control; mind wandering; sustained attention; vigilance