While it\u2019s commonly believed older adult minds wander more than those of young people, new Brock-led research is showing the opposite is true.<\/p>\n
Previous research on mind wandering relied on older participants\u2019 self-reporting of how often their mind wanders, says Psychology PhD student Sarah Henderson (BSc ’18, MA ’20)<\/span>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to answer with this study are two questions,\u201d she says. \u201cIs it actually true older adults are mind wandering less or is it just that they\u2019re telling us that they are? Secondly, if they are mind wandering less, is it because the way they mind wander might be different than what happens with younger people?\u201d<\/p>\n The American Psychological Association defines mind wandering<\/a> as a condition in which an individual\u2019s thoughts spontaneously turn to topics other than their present task.<\/p>\n Henderson and her team, supervised by Associate Professor of Psychology Karen Campbell, sought to come up with objective ways of measuring and comparing mind wandering in older and younger adults.<\/p>\n Their study of 49 younger and 40 older research participants involved two experiments.<\/p>\n In the first, participants were instructed to press a button every time a number appeared on a computer screen but refrain from doing so when an X was displayed. Most of the images were of numbers so the task became boring and repetitive.<\/p>\n The researchers measured mind wandering by the speed and consistency at which participants pressed the button. If they pressed it quickly at a steady rate, they were \u201con task,\u201d but if they were sometimes slow in responding, they were \u201coff task,\u201d with the assumption that their mind was somewhere else.<\/p>\n The team found older adults had less of a fluctuation in response times \u2014 they were more on task \u2014 than their younger counterparts.<\/p>\n In the second experiment, participants\u2019 brain activity was tested through electroencephalography (EEG) while doing the same task.<\/p>\n As was the case in the first experiment, the team found less variation in on- and off-task brainwaves in older participants compared to the younger ones, indicating there was less mind wandering among older participants.<\/p>\n But the off-task brainwaves of older and younger participants were almost identical, meaning they experience and process mind wandering in the same way. Their vision-related brain activity was normal, but the way they processed what they were seeing was impaired, says Henderson.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s akin to reading a book and you know your eyes are travelling across the page, but you realize after a few minutes that you haven\u2019t been paying attention to what you\u2019ve read, so you have to go and read it again,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n On the surface, the team\u2019s research findings seem to contradict earlier Brock research<\/a> showing older adults experience a loss of attentional control that makes them more easily distracted and forgetful.<\/p>\n