Boredom is a ubiquitous human experience that has been defined as an aversive mental state, typically induced by monotonous environments. While under physiological conditions, transient boredom experience is thought to enhance exploration and creativity, chronically increased boredom is significantly associated to a variety of psychopathologies, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Despite these psychosocial implications, the current understanding of the situational and cognitive underpinnings of boredom remains qualitative, in particular due to the lack of standardized psychophysical assessment tools to quantify boredom and its determinants.
In our work, we overcome this problem by presenting a novel behavioral paradigm to quantify individual boredom under defined environmental conditions. Specifically, we expose human subjects to stimuli with defined objective information content, while assessing individual boredom-related behavior and sentiment. We apply information theoretic measures to formalize external and internal factors of information transmission, finding that the information content of encountered stimuli, measured as empirical entropy, together with the personality structure of individuals are key drivers of boredom experience. Comparing the behavior of healthy subjects to a cohort of adult ADHD patients, we demonstrate that ADHD patients are characterized by reduced abilities to perceive information from sensory stimuli, predisposing them for higher boredom proneness.
Taken together, we delineate how individual traits and external stimulus features interact in the transmission of sensory information, identifying boredom as an affective response to states of low information transmission, which is aggravated in ADHD.