User:Daniel Peek/sandbox

The relationship between mind wandering and working memory capacity requires more research to understand how they influence one another. It is possible that mind-wandering causes lower performance on working memory capacity tasks or that lower working memory capacity causes more instances of mind-wandering.

Individual differences
There are individual differences in mind-wandering between older and younger adults. Although older adults reported less mind-wandering, these older participants showed the same amount of mind-wandering as younger adults. There was a difference in how participants responded to an error. After an error, older adults took longer to return focus back to the task when compared with younger adults. It is possible that older adults reflect more about an error due to conscientiousness. Personality can also affect mind-wandering. People that are more conscientious are less prone to mind-wandering. Being more conscientious allows people to stay focused on the task better which causes fewer instances of mind-wandering. Older adults tend to be more conscientious than younger adults so differences in mind-wandering between young and older adults may be limited because of this personality difference.

Mind-wandering and working memory
Another study compared differences in speed of processing information between people of different ages. The task they used a go/no go task where participants responded if a white arrow moved in a specific direction but did not respond if the arrow moved in the other direction or was a different color. In this task, children produced and young adults showed similar speed of processing but older adults were significantly slower. Speed of processing information effects how much information can be processed in working memory. People with faster speed of processing can encode information into memory better than people that have slower speed of processing. This can lead to memory of more items because more things can be encoded. Executive function is another part of memory related to mind-wandering. Executive function is similar to goal-orientation. An impairment in executive function leads to less focus on the goal of a task, leading to examples of mind-wandering.