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02-05-2019 | Original Article

The validity of the online thought-probing procedure of mind wandering is not threatened by variations of probe rate and probe framing

Auteurs: Anna-Lena Schubert, Gidon T. Frischkorn, Jan Rummel

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 7/2020

Abstract

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the measurement of mind wandering during ongoing tasks. The frequently used online thought-probing procedure (OTPP), in which individuals are probed on whether their thoughts are on-task or not while performing an ongoing task, has repeatedly been criticized, because variations in the frequency of thought probes and the order in which on-task and off-task thoughts are referred to have been shown to affect mind-wandering rates. Hitherto, it is unclear whether this susceptibility to measurement variation only affects mean response rates in probe-caught mind wandering or poses an actual threat to the validity of the OTPP, endangering the replicability and generalizability of study results. Here, we show in a sample of 177 students that variations of the frequency or framing of thought probes do not affect the validity of the OTPP. While we found that more frequent thought probing reduced the rate of probe-caught mind wandering, we did not replicate the effect that mind wandering is more likely to be reported when off-task thoughts are referred to first rather than second. Crucially, associations between probe-caught mind wandering and task performance, as well as associations between probe-caught mind wandering and covariates (trait mind wandering, reaction-time variability in the metronome-response task, and working-memory capacity) did not change with variations of the probing procedure. Therefore, it seems unlikely that the great heterogeneity in the way the OTPP is implemented across different studies endangers the replicability and generalizability of study results. Data and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/7w8bm/.

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The single difference between results of the preregistered analyses and the analyses reported in this manuscript concerned the three-way interaction between OSpan score, probe framing, and probe frequency, that was significant in the preregistered frequentist model without random slopes (\(b = -0.07, p = 0.037\)), but not in the Bayesian model with random slopes (\(b = -0.08\), \(95\% \,\hbox {CI}\, [-0.16;\, 0.01]\)). An inspection of the effect size of this effect, however, indicated that it was negligible (\(\omega _{{\mathrm{partial}}}^{{\mathrm{2}}} = 0.00\)) and would not have been significant if we had adjusted \(\alpha\) levels to account for the sequential sampling. Hence, any conclusion we drew from the present analyses would not have differed if we had relied on the preregistered plan of analysis.

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Titel: The validity of the online thought-probing procedure of mind wandering is not threatened by variations of probe rate and probe framing
Auteurs: Anna-Lena Schubert
Gidon T. Frischkorn
Jan Rummel
Publicatiedatum: 02-05-2019
Uitgeverij: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 7/2020
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01194-2

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