Mind wandering in reading: An embodied approach.

In the last 20 years, the study of mind wandering has attracted the attention of a growing number of researchers from fields like psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Mind wandering has been characterized in multiple ways: as task-unrelated, unintentional, stimulus-independent, or unguided thought processes. Those accounts have mostly focused on the identification of neurocognitive mechanisms that enable the emergence of mind-wandering episodes. Reading is one activity in which mind wandering frequently occurs, and it is widely accepted that mind wandering is detrimental for reading flow, comprehension and the capacity to make inferences based on the text. This mind wandering scepsis in reading is based on two unchallenged views: (i) that reading is a disembodied, mental activity of information processing, and (ii) that mind wandering is essentially characterized as a task-unrelated and involuntary thought process that disrupts all kinds of goal-oriented behavior. However, recent developments within cognitive science treat the mind as embodied and thus challenge both ontological and epistemological assumptions about what mind wandering is, where it is located, and how it is being studied empirically during reading. In this article we integrate embodied accounts of mind wandering and reading to show how reading benefits from nested mind wandering processes. Empirically, we investigate how a reader can move successfully in and out of different embodied processes and mesh different cognitive strategies over time, including some forms of mind wandering. While such changes in reading are frequently deemed dysfunctional, we suggest an alternative interpretation: Rather than seeking constant flow and fluency, we propose that reading is multi-actional and benefits from drawing on different cognitive strategies spanning mind wandering processes and goal-oriented behavior. In that sense, we suggest that mind wandering has a potential for enriching cognitive processes underlying reading, such as imagining and reflection. We exemplify these insights through analyses of data obtained in ethnographic and semi-experimental studies of reading practices. We conclude that to capture cognitive phenomena within an embodied framework, a richer methodology must be developed. Such a methodology must not only be capable of accounting for brains, bodies, and contexts in isolation, but must consider an overall brain-body-environment system.

Reading: How Readers Beget Imagining.

We trace reading to an embodied synthetic process that drives the rapid scales of imagining. As sensorimotor engagement with written artifacts permeates experience, it sharpens the sensibility that brings forth understanding. We thus trace material engagement with written artifacts to fine control over saccadic eye movements and voicing that draws on humans or what the Greeks knew as aisthesis. In reading, we identify aisthesis in how prereflective judgments punctuate the flow of engagement with written documents. While the study of reading often begins with "texts," we start with how written artifacts are put to use. We use cognitive ethnography to trace reading to how fine multiscalar coordination enables readers to engage with written artifacts such as books. Our ethnography of reading provides descriptions of how readers use sensorimotor activity to integrate understanding with saccading and actual or imagined vocalization in ways that show how reading connects sensorimotor schemata with highly skilled use of written artifacts. By pursuing the power of rapid multiscalar dynamics, we complement views of reading as slow-scale subjective experience. Rather than focus on interaction between a reader and an imagined author, we turn to coordinating with an affordance-rich environment. Human prereflective judgments demonstrably use collective experience with written signs. In fine-grained analysis of authentic data, we therefore track kinesthetic experience to how a child's vocalizations beget understanding and, at once, imagining. These observations show how engagement brings life to written signs by connecting other peoples' pasts with the use of gaze, gesture, voice, and touch. While describing saccades and bursts of vocalizing, we reach beyond analogies with interaction and, in so doing, the multiscalar approach takes enactive-ecological work beyond the slow interactional and social scales or reported experience. Imagining arises as readers use multiscalar happenings to bind the anticipated, the seen, and collective aspects of experience.