Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mind wandering is a state in which an individual’s attention is not fully focused on the task at hand. Mind wandering af-fects performance in many tasks requiring focused attention, including (online) learning. Previous studies have examinedeye tracking and self-report as a method to assess whether a person is mind wandering. Because the first method requiresspecialized technology and the second method may be susceptible to reporting biases, we here examine whether mousetracking can be used to predict mind wandering in tasks involving classical computer interfaces. Assuming that mouse tra-jectories towards a particular response on the screen are continuously updated by time-dependent and temporally-dynamiccognitive processes, as a behavioral methodology, mouse tracking could provide unique insight into a persons thoughts.In our experiment, a total of 183 students completed a mouse-based operation span task, during which their thoughts wereprobed and their mouse movements recorded. Mixed model analysis of the recordings indicated that initiation time andaverage speed can be used as predictors of task-unrelated thoughts. The results show that mouse movements may be ableto provide an objective measure of mind wandering in online tasks.