The preconditions and event-related potentials correlates of flow experience in an educational context

Abstract

Flow has been described as a perceived balance between task demands and personal skills, during which individuals become completely immersed in activities. The current study manipulated three levels of task demands to examine the preconditions of flow in an educational context and aimed to explore the neural correlates of flow by adopting event-related potential (ERP). A total of 23 participants performed an English word task in three conditions: low, moderate, and high task demand. The English word task consisted of two different sessions. During the first session, participants were required to remember the Chinese meanings of English words. During the second session, participants were instructed to recognize a word and its meaning, sequentially. The results showed that low task demand stimuli were optimal for flow in an educational context, as the learning task required much more task demand than the other tasks. Further, in the low task demand condition, a larger LPC and smaller P3 were observed, respectively, in the learning and recognizing sessions. A larger LPC was found to be related to successful semantic integration, indicating that participants could handle task challenges. A smaller P3 was found to be associated with the allocation of fewer attentional resources, indicating concentration intensity.