Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The recent surge in online learning demands better ways to monitor students' mind wandering (MW) episodes. We examined whether different eye movement measures were associated with MW in tasks with different cognitive demands. We found that a reduced number of fixations was associated with MW in tasks involving searching for information without clearly defined strategies. A larger variance in pupil diameter, as well as reduced eye movement consistency, were associated with MW when imagining a scenario with a central fixation. Reduced eye movement consistency, as well as reduced joint attention with another participant, were both associated with MW in tasks involving a clearly defined strategy. Interestingly, none of these eye movement measures was associated with MW in tasks involving well-learned visual routines such as face and scene identification, suggesting idiosyncrasy in eye movement behavior in these tasks. These findings have important implications for developing effective methods for detecting MW.