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Unfolding the Wandering Mind: Deconvolving Fixation-Related Potentials Reveals Early and Late Attentional Decoupling During Natural Reading

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Lincoln Lewis Esquerre¹ (llewises@uvm.edu), Haorui Sun¹, Dave Jangraw¹; ¹University of Vermont Glass Brain Lab

Mind wandering (MW) during reading illustrates the tension between internal thought and active sensory processing. However, investigating the EEG correlates of MW during naturalistic behavior is hindered by ocular artifacts and the temporal overlap of neural responses as participants make rapid eye movements. This study employed linear deconvolution to isolate fixation-related potentials (FRPs) from 39 participants performing a self-paced reading task called ReMind, which uses retrospective MW-onset reporting to isolate MW onset and offset times with higher temporal precision than previous studies. Using the Unfold toolbox, we modeled the EEG data as a combination of "On-Task" and "Mind-Wandering" FRPs while correcting for temporal overlap from adjacent fixations. We estimated FRPs separately for each participant and performed a Region of Interest (ROI) analysis (Occipital, Central, Parietal) across five time windows. FDR-corrected comparisons revealed significant effects of MW in the Posterior ROI. We observed an attenuation of the N1 component (120–200 ms; p = 0.0246), which could suggest sensory gating. Contrary to previous studies, there were no significant effects observed over the intermediate P2 or P3 components. Notably, a robust attenuation emerged in the late window (500-800 ms; p < 0.001), indicating sustained alterations in processing well after visual encoding. These findings suggest that the cognitive effects of perceptual decoupling in a naturalistic reading are slightly different from those described in ERP studies. By combining retrospective onset reporting with deconvolution, we offer novel insight into mind wandering’s effects on both early sensory components and late potentials suggestive of deeper semantic processing.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Multisensory