Associations between mind wandering, viewer interactions, and the meaningful structure of educational videos

Over the last years, and especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, online videos have become an integral part of education. Therefore, it is essential to understand how to design such videos to provide an efficient and engaging learning experience for the viewers. Regarding learning success, the occurrence of mind wandering is of particular relevance. Thus, this preregistered research investigates the perception of online videos by analyzing the relationship between viewer behavior (such as pause button presses), mind wandering, and event segmentation by employing logfiles of a large German online video platform for educational videos combined with data collected in two online studies. Contrary to our expectations, we found a significant positive correlation between pausing, seek and resume viewer behavior, and mind wandering. Furthermore, replicating previous research, we identified a significant positive correlation between pausing behavior and meaningful event boundaries in the video. Additionally, a significant positive correlation between perceived event boundaries and mind wandering was shown. The triangulation of three data sources suggests that mind-wandering co-occurs with perceived event boundaries and observable, logged behavior (e.g., pressing the pause button). Given that the overall mind-wandering occurrence was also positively related to self-reported learning, a possible interpretation of the data is that event boundaries may trigger task-related mind-wandering that might even be conducive to learning.