A Network Perspective on Music-Induced Mind-Wandering

Background: Recent research has shown that some characteristics of music, such as its tempo and emotional tone, can influence both the frequency and contents of mind-wandering episodes (e.g., Taruffi et al., 2021). Although this line of research has underscored the potential of music to steer individuals' thoughts in beneficial ways (such as leading to positive thought contents and/or subsequent mood), there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding of mind wandering’s workings.

Aim(s): Inspired by the psychometric network approach to understand psychological phenomena (Epskamp, 2020; Vroegh, 2021), the aim of this study is to examine music-induced mind-wandering as a dynamic network of interacting experiential features.

Methods: To assess the subjective experience of distracted thinking, we developed a multi-dimensional experience sampling (MDES) questionnaire (cf., Konu et al., 2021), which encompassed items on attentional focus, thought diversity, self-awareness, visual imagery, dissociation, valence, and calmness. MDES data were gathered from an online experiment (N = 352). Cross-sectional networks and within-person contemporaneous and temporal effects were estimated based on three measurement points: initial reading task, during, and directly after listening to instrumental music.

Results: Compared with reading, calmness became the most interconnected feature in the cross-sectional network underlying music-induced mind-wandering. Dissociation, together with calmness and focused attention were the most important drivers underlying the emergence (or hindering) of mind-wandering developing through time, with visual imagery being influenced the most by their prior, lagged condition.

Discussion and Conclusion: Although our approach is limited to three measurement points, the results nonetheless suggest potential time-dependent effects that lead up to and help explain the emergence of mind-wandering. Importantly, investigating distracted thinking while listening to music with network analysis provides additional insights into the subtle, temporal dynamics between experiential features assessed over a short period of time.

Talk presented at the 12th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, York, England.