Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We assessed mind wandering (MW) during film comprehension. We predicted that prior-knowledge would aid in theconstruction of a situation model of the film, which would suppress MW by directing attention towards task-related thoughts,and that interest would moderate this effect. In our 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 32.5 minutefilm The Red Balloon. Participants self-reported their interest in viewing the film immediately before the film presentationand reported self-caught instances of MW while viewing the film. The prior-knowledge condition reported less MW comparedto the control condition. MW also decreased over the course of the film, but only for the prior-knowledge condition, therebysuggesting a suppression effect. Finally, prior-knowledge effects on MW were only observed when interest was average orhigh.