TY  - JOUR
A1  - Soemer, Alexander
A1  - Schiefele, Ulrich
T1  - Working memory capacity and (in)voluntary mind wandering
JF  - Psychonomic bulletin & review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society
N2  - According to influential accounts of mind wandering (MW), working memory capacity (WMC) plays a key role in controlling the amount of off-task thought during the execution of a demanding task. Whereas WMC has primarily been associated with reduced levels of involuntarily occurring MW episodes in prior research, here we demonstrate for the first time that high-WMC individuals exhibit lower levels of voluntary MW. One hundred and eighty participants carried out a demanding reading task and reported their attentional state in response to random thought probes. In addition, participants' WMC was measured with two common complex span tasks (operation span and symmetry span). As a result, WMC was negatively related to both voluntary and involuntary MW, and the two forms of MW partially mediated the positive effect of WMC on reading performance. Furthermore, the negative relation between voluntary WM and reading remained significant after controlling for interest. Thus, in contrast to prior research suggesting that voluntary MW might be more closely related to motivation rather than WMC, the present results demonstrate that high-WMC individuals tend to limit both involuntary and voluntary MW more strictly than low-WMC individuals.
KW  - mind wandering
KW  - intention
KW  - working memory
KW  - executive control
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01737-4
SN  - 1069-9384
SN  - 1531-5320
VL  - 27
IS  - 4
SP  - 758
EP  - 767
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pañeda, Claudia
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vares, Elena
A1  - Veríssimo, João Marques
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Island effects in Spanish comprehension
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.
KW  - extraction islands
KW  - Spanish
KW  - reading comprehension
KW  - working memory
KW  - sentence processing
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1058
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 5
IS  - 1
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  -