Research by Drs. Peter Delaney and Lili Sahakyan was part of a recent Scientific American feature on mind wandering, which refers generally to the tendency to shift one’s attention away from a primary task.
In the 2010 paper that is discussed by Scientific American, Delaney and colleagues demonstrated that daydreams can cause forgetting of encoded events. Remarkably, daydreams that caused the greatest context-shift (e.g., thinking about taking international vacations rather than domestic vacations) resulted in greater forgetting. This striking finding is consistent with context-change accounts of forgetting and daydreaming.
The original paper is available here.
