Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2006, Pages 578-592
Consciousness and Cognition

Absent-mindedness: Lapses of conscious awareness and everyday cognitive failures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.11.009Get rights and content

Abstract

A brief self-report scale was developed to assess everyday performance failures arising directly or primarily from brief failures of sustained attention (attention-related cognitive errors—ARCES). The ARCES was found to be associated with a more direct measure of propensity to attention lapses (Mindful Attention Awareness Scale—MAAS) and to errors on an existing behavioral measure of sustained attention (Sustained Attention to Response Task—SART). Although the ARCES and MAAS were highly correlated, structural modelling revealed the ARCES was more directly related to SART errors and the MAAS to SART RTs, which have been hypothesized to directly reflect the lapses of attention that lead to SART errors. Thus, the MAAS and SART RTs appear to directly reflect attention lapses, whereas the ARCES and SART errors reflect the mistakes these lapses are thought to cause. Boredom proneness was also assessed by the BPS, as a separate consequence of a propensity to attention lapses. Although the ARCES was significantly associated with the BPS, this association was entirely accounted for by the MAAS, suggesting that performance errors and boredom are separate consequences of lapses in attention. A tendency to even extraordinarily brief attention lapses on the order of milliseconds may have far-reaching consequences not only for safe and efficient task performance but also for sustaining the motivation to persist in and enjoy these tasks.

Introduction

At all levels of ability, lapses of attention are clearly a part of everyone’s life. Some are merely inconvenient, such as missing a familiar turn-off on the highway, and some are extremely serious, such as failures of attention that cause accidents, injury, and loss of life (Robertson, 2003). Beyond the obvious costs of accidents arising from lapses in attention there is lost time, efficiency, personal productivity, and quality of life in the lapse and recapture of awareness and attention to everyday tasks. As the managers of Vonnegut’s fictional society well knew, lapses of attention are also inherently cognitively debilitating. Indeed, individuals for whom intervals between lapses are very short are typically viewed as impaired (Giambra, 1995). Given the prevalence of attentional failures in everyday life and the ubiquitous and sometimes disastrous consequences of such failures, it is rather surprising that relatively little work has been done to directly measure individual differences in everyday errors arising from propensities for failures of attention.

The present paper focuses on everyday errors that occur as a result of the mundane lapses of attention that occur when consciousness is absent or, at least, disengaged from ongoing tasks, for example, when we burn the toast, place the milk in the pantry and the sugar in the refrigerator, or lose the thread of conversations. Here, we report on the development of a self-report scale designed to measure propensities for making everyday errors that are the result of failures of attention. We also sought to provide conceptual and discriminative validation through associations with theoretically linked constructs and relevant behavioral assessment.

The work that is perhaps most relevant to a discussion of failures of attention in everyday settings has been conducted or inspired by Reason, 1977, Reason, 1979, Reason, 1984, Reason and Mycielska, 1982. In several diary studies, Reason had participants provide descriptions of action slips as they occurred in their daily lives. Based on these reports, Reason created a classification scheme for everyday failures. Most generally, Reason distinguished between errors based on mistakes in planning and those based on lapses in the course of execution. In the first case, errors arise from lack of knowledge, or inadequate or incorrect information (ignorance or misunderstanding), or from the misapplication of rules, or simply failure to implement them (i.e., faulty or absence inferences from available (correct) information). These sorts of errors will most likely occur in unfamiliar domains or problematic situations. Errors of the second type (i.e., those arising during execution), which constitute our present concern, tend to occur during highly practiced routine actions. There is, however, in such cases, an unexpected and apparently arbitrary departure from the normal smooth flow of action when events unfold in a manner inconsistent with plans. Reason labelled these rather succinctly as “actions not as planned.” It is worth noting that the actions not as planned that were recorded by Reason were not specific to failures of attention, but rather might have arisen from errors of attention, perception, memory, action execution or some combination of these factors (Reason, 1977, Reason, 1979).

Inspired, in part, by Reason’s work, Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, and Parkes (1982) designed the Cognitive Failure’s Questionnaire (CFQ) to assess individual differences in proneness to errors in routine activity. The CFQ was designed to assess a variety of commonplace errors. Items on this scale include questions about errors of action, attention, and memory. The available evidence suggests that the CFQ has considerable ecological validity. For instance, people who report a high frequency of cognitive failures (i.e., have high CFQ scores) tend to be more likely to cause automobile accidents than are people reporting a low degree of cognitive failures (e.g., Larson and Merritt, 1991, Larson et al., 1997). The CFQ also predicts how people cope with stress in their work environment (Broadbent et al., 1982). Some evidence that the CFQ is correlated, inter alia, with attention-related errors comes from studies showing that the CFQ correlates with overt behavioral measures of attention (e.g., Robertson et al., 1997, Tipper and Baylis, 1987). Nonetheless, although it is often employed as a measure of sustained attention (e.g., Robertson et al., 1997, Smallwood et al., 2004), it is clear that the CFQ measures proneness to more than just attention-related errors. Indeed, the items assessed by the CFQ were explicitly designed to be non-specific with regard to underlying cognitive processes. Broadbent et al. assumed that different processes leading to lapses would likely be positively associated. More recent studies suggest, however, that the CFQ might consist of a number of different underlying factors. And there seems to be little agreement on how many factors there are and what exactly these factors represent. For instance, Pollina, Greene, Tunick, and Puckett (1992) suggest that the CFQ consists of five underlying factors, which they describe as distractibility, misdirected actions, spatial/kinaesthetic memory, interpersonal intelligence, and memory for names. Seven and nine-factor solutions have been reported by Matthews, Coyle, and Craig (1990) and a two-factor solution has been reported by Larson et al. (1997). The meaning of this bewildering assortment of factors is quite unclear, except that the CFQ would seem to assess a good deal more than attention-related cognitive failures. Adding to the conceptual confusion, some items on the CFQ refer directly to attention lapses (e.g., daydreaming) rather than errors consequent to such lapses. Thus, the CFQ assesses both attention lapses without action errors as well as a variety of action errors and cognitive failures potentially resulting from several underlying cognitive failures, including attention lapses.

Such results are perhaps unsurprising as the CFQ items were intended to, and evidently do, sample a wide array of cognitive failures. As such, the CFQ does not provide a specific measure of attention-related errors. To our knowledge, a scale that directly assesses attention-related cognitive errors has not been previously developed. The frequent use of the CFQ as a proxy for attention-related action and cognitive failures suggests a need for such a scale.

We first set out to find everyday cognitive failures for which attention lapses seemed the major, originary, or most likely, cause, that is, failures associated with inadequate monitoring of highly practiced, familiar, repetitive, or tedious tasks for which there are obvious, appropriate, and adequate rules known and available to the actor. We began by selecting items from the CFQ that seem most likely to primarily reflect attentional lapses, adding items from Reason, 1977, Reason, 1979, Reason, 1984, as well as from our own experiences based on personal diaries of attentional lapses. The resulting scale we called the Attention-Related Cognitive Errors Scale (ARCES). We specifically refer to “attention-related” errors as we sought to include items reflecting errors in performance that would result in part or entirely from attentional lapses.

In an effort to assess the assumption that the errors measured by the ARCES are the result of attention lapses, in Study 1 we sought to evaluate the association between the ARCES and a measure that directly indexes everyday attention lapses but not subsequent errors in performance. A scale that appears to do this is the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS—Brown & Ryan, 2003). The MAAS purports to be a measure of the ability to sustain conscious awareness of attention in everyday life. Items generally refer, however, to tendencies to perform “automatically,” “without being aware,” “without much awareness” or “without paying attention,” except for two items, which were eliminated for our analyses as they did refer to performance errors. Interestingly, as virtually all items reflecting positive endorsements of mindfulness were eliminated during test construction (Brown & Ryan, 2003, pp. 825–826), all retained items actually reflect a tendency to experience lapses of attention or conscious awareness and hence are reverse scored to provide a positive scale of mindfulness. It would be more accurate, however, to describe the MAAS as directly assessing a propensity to experience such lapses. Thus, under the hypothesis that the ARCES items are a consequence of the sorts of lapses reflected in the MAAS items, a substantial negative (as a consequence of the convention of reverse scoring) association is predicted between the MAAS and the ARCES.

There are grounds to suggest that a related consequence of the inability to engage and sustain attention is boredom. Boredom is often described as an aversive affective or cognitive state (Izard, 1977; Plutchik, 1980, Tompkins, 1962), but is arguably more fundamentally an inability to engage and sustain attention (Berlyne, 1960, Damrad-Frye and Laird, 1989, Hebb, 1966). Boredom has been concisely defined as a state arising when we are: (a) prevented from doing what we want to do or (b) forced to do what we do not want to do” (Fenichel, 1951). These two situational types of boredom may be referred to as thwarted engagement of attention and forced engagement of attention. A third type of boredom, not explicitly named in the literature on boredom, is characterized not by constraint, but by a condition of apparent freedom in which the individual is nonetheless unable to maintain attention on, or interest in, any object, environmental or mental. That is, we are free to do what we will but nothing engages our attention for any appreciable duration. This latter definition would appear to reflect a dispositional tendency of proneness to boredom. In all three types, attention is the key process implicated in boredom.

Consistent with the last, dispositional definition, there is an extensive literature suggesting substantial individual differences in susceptibility to boredom (Vodanovich, 2003). Attention slips and action failures are frequently attributed to situational boredom (Reason and Lucas, 1984, Robertson et al., 1997) and, consistent with this claim, boredom proneness, assessed by the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), has been found to be positively associated with the CFQ (Wallace et al., 2002, Wallace et al., 2003). It is also possible that boredom proneness leads to carelessness, and is directly associated with a tendency to make high rates of cognitive and behavioral errors through lack of motivation or effort. According to the foregoing definitions, however, boredom prone individuals have fundamental deficits in the ability to sustain attention. On the present view, therefore, everyday cognitive errors and boredom proneness are two separate consequences of a tendency to experience attention lapses. This reasoning leads to the hypothesis of a positive association between attention-related errors (measured by the ARCES) and boredom proneness (measured by BPS) as a result of a common association with the propensity to have lapses of attention (measured by the MAAS). This hypothesis was also assessed in Study 1.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 449 undergraduates enrolled in an Introductory Psychology course. Included with the scales of Study 1 were several samples of the general on-line assessments associated with Introductory Psychology. Students received bonus credit for completing the questionnaires.

Measures

An attention-related cognitive errors scale (ARCES) was developed based on items from the Broadbent CFQ, examples from Reason, and by the current authors’ own experiences based on entries from attention failure

Study 2

Having established that the ARCES is related to, yet distinct from, an existing measure of the inability to sustain attention (i.e., the MAAS), in Study 2 we sought to evaluate whether the ARCES preferentially measures attention-related errors and not other cognitive failures such as memory errors. To do this we sought a questionnaire specifically to assess memory failures. This proved more difficult than expected as many of the memory failures in everyday life really indirectly reflect prior

Summary and conclusions

Notwithstanding the challenge of isolating specific processes underlying everyday cognitive failures, our attempt to create a measure of attention-related cognitive failures (i.e., the ARCES) was met with some success. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the ARCES measures attention-related errors that are related to, yet distinct from, lapses in conscious attention. First, we found that the ARCES is strongly related to the MAAS, a self report scale of proneness to attentional

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    This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council awarded to D.S. Special thanks to James Danckert and John Eastwood for their helpful comments on the topics of boredom and attention.

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