The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: 13 years on

<p>An abundance of evidence suggests that mind-wandering, or task-unrelated thought, poses significant detriments to performance. In 2013, however, Mooneyham &amp;amp; Schooler broadened mind-wandering’s impact by reviewing emerging literature on both its costs and benefits. Research has now expanded enough that mind-wandering can no longer be treated as a simple failure of attention. In this sequel, we synthesize key findings from the past 13 years on when mind-wandering harms and when it helps. On the cost side, mind-wandering can reduce sensitivity to others’ pain, spread lapses across peers in learning contexts, disrupt fine motor control, and weaken memory encoding. On the benefit side, mind-wandering is linked with improved memory consolidation, especially when thoughts return to recently learned material. Additional work suggests that mind-wandering can facilitate extraction of hidden probabilistic structure during statistical learning, support low-stakes decisions with less deliberative effort, and reduce semantic satiation during highly repetitive tasks. We also revisit mind-wandering’s relation to mood, emphasizing that affective outcomes depend on more than just task-relatedness alone. This article outlines future directions to cultivate a sharper scientific understanding of how mind-wandering shapes different kinds of behavior.</p>