Dispositional Factors Account for Age Differences in Self-Reported Mind-Wandering

The present study investigated the contribution of dispositional factors in accounting for the perplexing negative relationship between aging and mind-wandering (MW). First, we sought to examine whether experimentally manipulating participants' motivation during a modified Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) would modulate sustained attention performance and MW reports for younger and older adults. Results indicated that a performance-based motivational incentive influenced self-reported motivation and objective measures of sustained attention performance for younger, but not older, adults as compared to a control block. However, the motivation manipulation did not significantly modulate either younger or older adults' MW reports. Second, we tested the unique contributions of conscientiousness, interest, and motivation in predicting state-level, trait-level, and SART MW reports along with a composite measure of all three predictors. The results from a series of mediation and regression analyses indicated 4 (a) that conscientiousness and interest fully accounted for the relationship between age and four different self-reported MW estimates and (b) that self-reported motivation did not account for any unique variance in predicting MW reports above and beyond age. The dispositional factors also accounted for the observed differences in No-Go accuracy but did not fully account for the age differences in the coefficient of variation. Discussion focuses on distinctions between self-report and objective measures of MW and more general implications of considering dispositional factors in cognitive aging research.

Automated summary

The study found that dispositional factors such as conscientiousness and interest played a significant role in explaining the relationship between age and mind-wandering, while self-reported motivation did not independently affect mind-wandering reports.