Abstract

The decrease in vigilance refers to the decline in sustained attention during prolonged tasks, which often leads to increased errors and accidents. However, to date, there are no experimental tasks that simultaneously measure changes in vigilance, cognitive control, and mind wandering across time-on-task. We adapted the ANTI-Vea task to integrate mind wandering measures along with assessments of vigilance and cognitive control. By inserting thought probes at different frequencies per block, we aimed to identify the optimal thought probes rate that captures mind wandering changes without interfering with the measurement of vigilance, thereby providing an integrative assessment of changes in mind wandering, cognitive control, and vigilance across time. We conducted two experiments: one in the laboratory with 90 students from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, and another online, as a replication, with 180 students from the University of Granada, Spain. Participants were divided into three groups (4, 8, 12 TP per block) and completed the ANTI-Vea-TP task. The results revealed that the inclusion of TPs was effective in detecting changes in mind- wandering over time-on-task. Moreover, TP frequency did not have a significant effect on mind-wandering reports, vigilance, or cognitive control over time-on-task. We discuss the potential suitability of this tool to investigate the interaction between vigilance, cognitive control, and MW, both in laboratory and online environments, which is essential for evaluating different theories of vigilance decrement.