Oops! is a web site dedicated to discovering the absent and wandering mind and some of its consequences.
In this site we provide examples, often entertaining, of mind-wandering and its consequences, some essays on inattention, and an opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the causes and consequences of mind-wandering.
The Daily Oops!
Though notoriously absentminded U2 frontman Bono Vox usually lost nothing more important than keys, money, socks, and underwear, he occasionally lost more significant articles. Shortly before entering the studio to record October in 1981, for example, Bono lost the lyrics to all of the album's songs.
How can you contribute to Oops!?
We have a number of questionnaires and behavioral assessments of attention and its failures, as well as a number of related measures. You can help us by participating in our research.
Anecdotal reports suggest that during periods of inattention or mind wandering, people tend to experience increased fidgeting. In four studies, we examined whether individual differences in the tendency to be inattentive and to mind wander in everyday life are related to the tendency to make spontaneous and involuntary movements...
Although objective measures of memory performance typically indicate memory declines with age, self-reported memory failures often show no relation to age. In contrast, self-reported attention failures are reliably negatively correlated with age. This contrast suggests...
In two studies of a GO–NOGO task assessing sustained attention, we examined the effects of (1) altering speed–accuracy trade-offs through instructions (emphasizing both speed and accuracy or accuracy only) and (2) auditory alerts distributed throughout the task...
Attention lapses resulting from reactivity to task challenges and their consequences constitute a pervasive factor affecting everyday performance errors and accidents. A bidirectional model of attention lapses (error <--> attention-lapse: Cheyne, Solman, Carriere, & Smilek, 2009) argues that errors beget errors by generating attention lapses; resource-depleting cognitions...
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