All Joking Aside: Eye-Tracking Reveals Impaired Processing of Jokes during Mind-Wandering

In a garden-path joke, the initial semantic set-up is violated by the final punchline. Resolving this incongruity requires cognitive effort. The current study used eye-tracking and showed that mind-wandering, especially intentional mind-wandering, impaired reader’s ability to process the punchline, leading to a recall disadvantage of jokes compared to coherent control.