Too hard, too easy, or just right? The effects of context on effort and boredom aversion.

ABSTRACT: Despite people's general desire to avoid cognitive effort, there is a limit to our parsimony: boredom, a state defined by a lack of successful mental engagement, is found to be similarly aversive. The work presented here investigates how context - the alternative tasks present and the environmental context - impacts people's aversion to exerting cognitive effort and avoiding boredom via a demand-selection task. In a population of undergraduate students, we assessed how people's willingness to exert mental effort (in a working memory task) is affected by the presence of an easier alternative (less cognitively demanding) or a boring alternative (doing nothing at all). To manipulate environmental context, we conducted the experiment online, where participants completed the task remotely, and

SUBMITTER: Embrey JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11680605 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature