Brock University Study Finds Older Adults’ Minds Wander Less Compared to Younger Individuals

While it’s commonly believed older adult minds wander more than those of young people, new Brock-led research is showing the opposite is true.

Previous research on mind wandering relied on older participants’ self-reporting of how often their mind wanders, says Psychology PhD student Sarah Henderson (BSc ’18, MA ’20).

“What we’re trying to answer with this study are two questions,” she says. “Is it actually true older adults are mind wandering less or is it just that they’re telling us that they are? Secondly, if they are mind wandering less, is it because the way they mind wander might be different than what happens with younger people?”

The American Psychological Association defines mind wandering as a condition in which an individual’s thoughts spontaneously turn to topics other than their present task.

Henderson and her team, supervised by Associate Professor of Psychology Karen Campbell, sought to come up with objective ways of measuring and comparing mind wandering in older and younger adults.

Their study of 49 younger and 40 older research participants involved two experiments.

In the first, participants were instructed to press a button every time a number appeared on a computer screen but refrain from doing so when an X was displayed. Most of the images were of numbers so the task became boring and repetitive.

The researchers measured mind wandering by the speed and consistency at which participants pressed the button. If they pressed it quickly at a steady rate, they were “on task,” but if they were sometimes slow in responding, they were “off task,” with the assumption that their mind was somewhere else.

The team found older adults had less of a fluctuation in response times — they were more on task — than their younger counterparts.

In the second experiment, participants’ brain activity was tested through electroencephalography (EEG) while doing the same task.

As was the case in the first experiment, the team found less variation in on- and off-task brainwaves in older participants compared to the younger ones, indicating there was less mind wandering among older participants.

But the off-task brainwaves of older and younger participants were almost identical, meaning they experience and process mind wandering in the same way. Their vision-related brain activity was normal, but the way they processed what they were seeing was impaired, says Henderson.

“It’s akin to reading a book and you know your eyes are travelling across the page, but you realize after a few minutes that you haven’t been paying attention to what you’ve read, so you have to go and read it again,” she says.

On the surface, the team’s research findings seem to contradict earlier Brock research showing older adults experience a loss of attentional control that makes them more easily distracted and forgetful.

Campbell, who is Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging, explains that older adults may experience more distraction from the external environment than from internal thoughts.

“Older adults are really good at staying on task when they want to do well, so this may help them block out irrelevant thoughts,” she says. “However, our past work has shown that this doesn’t extend to distracting sights and sounds in the environment. These are more disruptive to older adults.”

Henderson says the study shows not only is there proof older adults report their incidents of mind wandering accurately, but challenges stereotypes about older adults.

“This research shows there are positive aspects of aging, there are things that improve with age,” she says.