In sight, out of mind? Effects of task disengagement on visual recall precision
Disengaging from the external world—a phenomenon referred to as mind wandering—is a ubiquitous experience that has been shown to be associated with detriments in cognitive performance across a large range of tasks. In the current web-based study, we investigated the impact of task disengagement at encoding on memory performance, specifically on the quantitative (likelihood of successful recall) and qualitative (recall precision) aspects of visual long-term memory. We used a continuous delayed estimation paradigm in combination with mathematical modeling of the participants’ recall errors to distinguish the impact of off- and on-task encoding processes on visual long-term memory. Task disengagement was assessed with thought probes on a dichotomous (on- vs. off-task) and a continuous response scale (from 0% to 100% on-task). The participants were tested in an online setting (not-assisted condition, n = 27) and in an online setting assisted by an experimenter (phone-assisted condition, n = 27). The results show that being disengaged from the task during encoding predicted worse memory performance in terms of both quantity and quality. The findings suggest a graded nature of task disengagement that covaries with fine-grained differences in subsequent memory performance. Furthermore, the results highlight the potential of assessing task disengagement using thought probes in a web-based experiment.