Abstract
Boredom has been defined as an aversive mental state that is induced by the disability to engage in satisfying activity, most often experienced in monotonous environments. However, current understanding of the situational factors inducing boredom and driving subsequent behavior remains incomplete. Here, we introduce a two-alternative forced-choice task coupled with sensory stimulation of different degrees of monotony. We find that human subjects develop a bias in decision-making, avoiding the more monotonous alternative that is correlated with self-reported state boredom. This finding was replicated in independent laboratory and online experiments and proved to be specific for the induction of boredom rather than curiosity. Furthermore, using theoretical modeling we show that the entropy in the sequence of individually experienced stimuli, a measure of information gain, serves as a major determinant to predict choice behavior in the task. With this, we underline the relevance of boredom for driving behavioral responses that ensure a lasting stream of information to the brain.
Highlights
Boredom has been defined as an aversive mental state that is induced by the disability to engage in satisfying activity, most often experienced in monotonous environments
We present a paradigm that both elicits boredom under conditions of controlled and scalable environmental monotony while at the same time providing a parametric readout of boredom-related behavior: In a simple psychophysical repeated choice task we offered two alternatives that were coupled with different degrees of repetitive sensory stimulation, and observed that individuals bias their choices as to avoid monotony
When investigating the visual modality, libraries consisted of images of neutral objects, whereas for the auditory modality we used recordings of single spoken words with neutral meaning. We refer to this paradigm as the Boredom Choice Task (BCT)
Summary
Boredom has been defined as an aversive mental state that is induced by the disability to engage in satisfying activity, most often experienced in monotonous environments. We find that human subjects develop a bias in decision-making, avoiding the more monotonous alternative that is correlated with self-reported state boredom This finding was replicated in independent laboratory and online experiments and proved to be specific for the induction of boredom rather than curiosity. Previous work has identified different such situational factors that lead to boredom, converging on two main independent factors: first, a lack of meaning and value in a given situation and, second, a lack of attention due to a mismatch of individual cognitive demands and r esources[1,25,26] In line with this theoretical framework, different experimental approaches have been used in order to induce boredom, comprising monotonous motor t asks[27–29] and monotonous sensory s timulation[27,30,31]. The visual entropy of a thrilling cinematic movie is potentially much greater since the frame could
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