The Effects of Attention Contagion on Task-Unrelated Thought in a Virtual Lecture

Social contagion has been extensively explored within educational contexts, showing that behaviors spread between students in a classroom. Until recently, however, the cognitive aspects of social contagion (e.g., attention and mind-wandering) have been unstudied. Attention appears to be contagious: Students in the presence of visibly inattentive students, whether in-person or online, also rate themselves as less attentive. These few explorations into attention contagion, however, have left open questions regarding the spread of mind-wandering, or task-unrelated thought (TUT), within virtual settings. The current study addresses the following questions. First, does TUT spread among students within virtual lectures? Second, do students’ attention states impact virtual classmates’ learning? We addressed these questions in a between-subjects online experiment in which 352 participants watched a simulated virtual lecture with either attentive or inattentive confederates on-screen. During the lecture, participants responded to interspersed thought probes to measure TUTs. To create a knowledge baseline, participants completed a pretest assessing general and specific lecture-topic knowledge. Following the lecture, participants completed a postlecture test to assess learning of the lecture material. Results indicated a significant between-condition difference in TUT rates (whether or not they included reports of environmental distraction), with participants in the inattentive-confederates condition having a significantly higher TUT rate. In contrast, we did not find an effect of attention contagion on learning, although our learning assessment may have been problematic.