A task to induce, quantify and operationalize subjectively perceived boredom
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Abstract
Boredom, as often experienced in everyday life, has been defined as an aversive mental state that is associated with the disability to engage in satisfying activity with a monotonous environment and was furthermore implicated in several clinical conditions, including ADHD and depression. However, research on boredom is still scarce and current measures of boredom mostly rely on subjective self-report questionnaires. Here, a novel psychophysical task is presented, which in human experiments allows the induction, quantification and operationalization of boredom. Concretely, a two-alternative choice preference task was used in a laboratory and online environment, with the two alternatives being associated with different sensory stimuli, either monotonous or variable. The stimulation was either visual, with images of daily-life objects, or auditory, with recordings of spoken German words. This task robustly induced state boredom experience. Furthermore, a choice bias towards the variable over monotonous alternative was found, that significantly correlated positively to the self-reported level of state boredom. Interestingly, this effect was comparable between experiments using visual and auditory stimuli, consistent with the idea that boredom is independent of a specific sensory modality. We next quantified the monotony avoidance bias over a range of varying degrees of monotony, by controlling the size of the stimulus libraries that were associated with each of the two alternatives. This revealed empirical entropy of experienced stimulation to be a substantial driver of consecutive behavior. A theoretical framework is proposed to quantify and interpret factors, which account for participants’ individual behavior. Taken together, this study establishes an objective behavioral task that captures aspects of subjectively reported state boredom in humans. The simplicity of this paradigm will potentially enable future investigations of boredom in translational and neurophysiological research conditions, which have hardly been accessible with previous assessment tools.