Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The aim of this study is to investigate whether trait differencesin mind wandering can also predict state differences in mindwandering. More specifically, we ask whether dimensions ofdisengagement, improvisation, and navigation of mind wan-dering thoughts in daily life also influence these dimensions ofmind wandering states during performance of a tracing task.Previous findings concerning the relationship between trait andstate mind wandering are inconsistent. Although studies indi-cate a significant relationship between the two, the correlatesof trait mind wandering and state mind wandering are not al-ways the same. Because of this, we expect to shed some lighton these inconsistencies by using a novel measure of mindwandering, which captures essential individual differences inthe nature of the phenomenon. Our results indicate that indi-vidual differences in trait mind wandering significantly predictstate differences in content variation of mind wandering andtask performance, but not in perceptual decoupling or in men-tal navigation. Implications of these findings are discussed.