CONSCIOUSNESS

120 3. Cognitive Sciences and Psychology
differed from that prior to on task reports (showing less sensitivity to lexical features). In the
work to be presented we will describe findings which suggest that simple reaction time measures
can also discriminate periods of mindless vs. mindful reading. Here, participants read
a story presented one word at a time, pressing the spacebar to advance the text. Periodically,
participants are probed as to whether they are on task, tuning out, or zoning out. The results
converge with the eye-tracking studies and show that it is possible to predict whether or not a
participant will be mind-wandering at a probe based on the reaction times to the words leading
up to that probe. C19
156 Attentional Orienting - Conscious or Unconscious? Narisa Marrett, Anthony
Lambert. (Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland,
New Zealand)
Implicit learning is used to describe learning that occurs without intention or conscious
awareness. A series of three experiments are reported here, which all used a bilateral letter
version of Posner’s visual cueing paradigm (Posner, 1980) to explore the contributions of
implicit and explicit (conscious) processes to attentional orienting. In Experiment 1 a valid
letter cue was associated with the target location on 80% of trials and the effects of aging were
examined. In Experiment 2 a ‘split-block’ design was used in which the proportion of valid
trials in the first two blocks was 80%; which was reduced to 50% for the final two blocks.
In Experiment 3 ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ letter cues were randomly interspersed, in order to
compare responses to the two trial types. Results indicated that the processes involved in
attentional orienting using bilateral letter cues were largely explicit in nature for both older
and younger adults. This contrasted with earlier findings by Lambert, Naikar, McLachlan and
Aitken (1999; Experiment 1) and reasons for this empirical discrepancy were considered. P9
157 Staying on Track: Mindful Breathing Reduces Mind-Wandering Michael Mrazek,
Jonathan Smallwood; Michael Franklin; Jonathan Schooler
(Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA)
This study examined the usefulness of meditation as a tool for leading to short term reductions
in mind-wandering. Participants either completed eight minutes of mindful breathing,
passive resting, or reading before subsequently completing a ten minute sustained attention to
response task commonly used to study mind-wandering. Mindful breathing resulted in significantly
improved performance, indicating that this technique can lead to short term improvements
in attention even among individuals without prior experience with meditation. C10
158 Situation and Self: The Case of the Wandering Mind Jules Troyer
(Psychology, Delta State University, Cleveland, MS)
Traditionally, mind-wandering is viewed as an undesirable decoupling of attention from
a current mental task. When an individual engages in mind-wandering, without awareness, it
greatly impairs the ability to construct effective situational mental models and subsequently
solve problems. Does the propensity for unintentional mind-wandering impair an individual’s
ability to know the self, as well as the external world? This paper investigates whether people
who are less aware of the external environment and the objects and situations occurring within
it, also are less aware of the self and internal thoughts and emotions. The analysis of responses
of 450 participants on the Troyer Level of Consciousness Inventory (Troyer, 2008) and the
Situational Self-Awareness Scale (Govern & Marsch, 2001), strongly indicates that people
who report difficulty in regulating attention have a low awareness of both internal thoughts
and emotions, as well as a low awareness of the external environment. The implications of a
prolonged tendancy of mind-wandering are discussed; including issues such as why people
have a low level of self-awareness, difficulty in regulating their behavior, problems with cognitive
reflection, aversion to openness with others and why certain people do not engage in
empathetic or helping behaviors. C19
3.2 Vision