Jennifer C. McVay

There are 6 included publications by Jennifer C. McVay :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Aging ebbs the flow of thought: Adult age differences in mind wandering, executive control, and self-evaluation. 2013 3276 Two experiments examined the relations among adult aging, mind wandering, and executive-task performance, following from surprising laboratory findings that older adults report fewer task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) than do younger adults (e.g., Giambr...
Dispatching the wandering mind? Toward a laboratory method for cuing “spontaneous” off-task thought. 2013 2303 Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists study most phenomena of attention by measuring subjects' overt responses to discrete environmental stimuli that can be manipulated to test competing theories. The mind wandering experience, however, cannot ...
Drifting from slow to “D’oh!” Working memory capacity and mind wandering predict extreme reaction times and executive-control errors. 2012 3054 A combined experimental, individual-differences, and thought-sampling study tested the predictions of executive attention (e.g., Engle & Kane, 2004) and coordinative binding (e.g., Oberauer, Süß, Wilhelm, & Sander, 2007) theories of working memory ca...
The mediating role of mind wandering in the relationship between working memory capacity and reading comprehension. 2010 4823 The primary goal of this study was to investigate the mediating role of mind wandering in the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and reading comprehension as predicted by the executive-attention theory of WMC (e.g., Kane & Engle, 2...
Why does working memory capacity predict variation in reading comprehension? On the influence of mind wandering and executive attention. 2012 4378 Some people are better readers than others, and this variation in comprehension ability is predicted by measures of working memory capacity (WMC). The primary goal of this study was to investigate the mediating role of mind-wandering experiences in t...
Working memory capacity does not always support future-oriented mind wandering. 2013 3440 To evaluate the claim that mind-wandering demands executive resources, and more specifically that people with better executive control will have the resources to engage in more future-oriented thought than will those with poorer executive control, we...