Mind-wandering While Reading: Attentional Decoupling, Mindless Reading and the Cascade Model of Inattention

When the mind wanders to unrelated thoughts and feelings while reading, the eyes often continue to scan the words without due attention to their meaning. This mindless reading, similar to states such as daydreaming or absentminded lapses, is a state of decoupled processing in which attention to ongoing perceptual information is reduced often in favor of the active consideration of internally generated thoughts and feelings. Normal reading involves a complex interaction between bottom-up representations of the text that is being read and top-down representations of the more general context that help to keep the readers mind on what they are doing. Since states of decoupling involve a reduced processing of sensory information, the coupling between the reader and the text breaks down during mindless reading. This reduced external coupling is one reason why mind-wandering during reading has significant implications for reading comprehension. Following the presentation of a model of the decoupled state and a specific consideration of mind-wandering during reading, five key unresolved issues for future research in mindless reading are identified.