title: Mind wandering during film comprehension: The role of prior knowledge and situational interest.
abstract: This study assessed the occurrence and factors that influence mind wandering (MW) in the domain of film comprehension. The cascading model of inattention assumes that a stronger mental representation (i.e., a situation model) during comprehension results in less MW. Accordingly, a suppression hypothesis suggests that MW would decrease as a function of having the knowledge of the plot of a film prior to viewing, because the prior-knowledge would help to strengthen the situation model during comprehension. Furthermore, an interest-moderation hypothesis would predict that the suppression effect of prior-knowledge would only emerge when there was interest in viewing the film. In the current experiment, 108 participants either read a short story that depicted the plot (i.e., prior-knowledge condition) or read an unrelated story of equal length (control condition) prior to viewing the short film (32.5 minutes) entitled The Red Balloon. Participants self-reported their interest in viewing the film immediately before the film was presented. MW was tracked using a self-report method targeting instances of MW with metacognitive awareness. Participants in the prior-knowledge condition reported less MW compared with the control condition, thereby supporting the suppression hypothesis. MW also decreased over the duration of the film, but only for those with prior-knowledge of the film. Finally, prior-knowledge effects on MW were only observed when interest was average or high, but not when interest was low.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 203 Haggar Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA. kkopp@nd.edu.
authors.forename: Kristopher
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kopp
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 203 Haggar Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
authors.forename: Caitlin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mills
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 203 Haggar Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
authors.forename: Sidney
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: D'Mello
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008297:Male; D000067489:Metacognition; D009040:Motion Pictures; D011897:Random Allocation; D011932:Reading; D057566:Self Report; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Film comprehension; Mind wandering; Situational interest