Page No 51-61
Aviti Jain, Anil Kumar Yadav, Shreshtha Yadav, & Trayambak Tiwari
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
People often experience mind wandering during reading which leads to attention lapses
and difficulties in comprehension making it a cause of concern. This systematic review
was an attempt to investigate the effect of task demand on mind wandering and reading
comprehension. It seeks to analyze how text difficulty affects the patterns of mind
wandering and how it interacts with individual differences during a reading comprehension
task which could impact mind wandering. Following PRISMA guidelines a systematic
search was carried out using four academic databases Web of science, Scopus,
PubMed, JSTOR for selecting and screening the articles, six articles were found to be
eligible for current review and were analyzed based on their results. Text difficulty along
with participant related factors seem to affect both voluntary and involuntary mind
wandering as well as the direction of this relationship which varies with respect to
variables like text difficulty, text length, working memory capacity, attentional control,
text interest and prior knowledge. This review highlighted that rising difficulty increased
mind wandering which explains the negative impact of text difficulty on reading
comprehension. It also suggested that no single theory of mind-wandering can fully
account for the interaction between text difficulty and mind-wandering instead different
theories explain certain aspects of the mechanism. Situation model view, executive
control hypothesis, cognitive -flexibility hypothesis emerged as potential explanations
to this dynamic relationship