Lost in thought: Investigating the impact of mind-wandering on pupillary responses in recognition memory

Mind-wandering – disengagement from the current task with a shift of attention toward internal thoughts is present across situations. Despite the large amount of research studying the influence of mind-wandering on current tasks, the influence of mind-wandering during encoding of information on subsequent recall is rather under-researched, especially when it comes to combining methodologies, as we plan to do in this project. We aim to track the impact of mind-wandering during presentation of visual information on subsequent recognition of the information. Specifically, we aim to predict both memory performance as well as pupil dilation during memory recognition with mind-wandering assessed during encoding via self-reported allocation of attention (on-task vs. off-task). More generally, we aim to explore several eye parameters (eye fixations, eye blinks, and pupil dilation) both during encoding and recognition in order to understand the relationships between mind-wandering, attention, and memory.