Despite the ubiquitous nature of boredom, the definition, function, and correlates of boredom are still poorly understood. In this review, we summarize the “known” (consistent evidence) and “unknown” ...(inconsistent evidence) correlates of boredom. We show that boredom is consistently related to negative affect, task-unrelated thought, over-estimation of elapsed time, reduced agency, as well as to over- and under-stimulation. Activation of the default mode network was consistent across the few available fMRI studies, while the recruitment of other brain areas such as the hippocampus and anterior insular cortex, was a notable but less consistent correlate of boredom. Other less consistent correlates of boredom are also reviewed, such as the level of arousal and the mental attributions given to fluctuations of attention. Finally, we identify two critical factors that may contribute to current inconsistencies in the literature and may hamper further progress in the field. First, there is relatively little consistency in the way in which boredom has been operationalized across studies to date, with operationalizations of boredom ranging from negative affect paired with under-stimulation, over-stimulation, to negative affect paired with a lack of goal-directed actions. Second, preliminary evidence suggests the existence of distinct types of boredom (e.g., searching vs. apathetic) that may have different and sometimes even opposing correlates. Adopting a more precise and consistent way of operationalizing boredom, and arriving at an empirically validated taxonomy of different types of boredom, could serve to overcome the current roadblocks to facilitate further progress in our scientific understanding of boredom.
•The vast majority of research currently defines mind wandering as off-task thought.•Freedom of movement in thought is introduced as a new dimension of mind wandering.•Freedom of movement in thought ...is only weakly correlated to being off-task.•40% of thoughts were misclassified if off-task thought is assumed to be freely-moving.
Mind wandering is frequently defined as task-unrelated or perceptually decoupled thought. However, these definitions may not capture the dynamic features of a wandering mind, such as its tendency to ‘move freely’. Here we test the relationship between three theoretically dissociable dimensions of thought: freedom of movement in thought, task-relatedness, and perceptual decoupling (i.e., lack of awareness of surroundings). Using everyday life experience sampling, thought probes were randomly delivered to participants’ phones for ten days. Results revealed weak intra-individual correlations between freedom of movement in thought and task-unrelatedness, as well as perceptual decoupling. Within our dataset, over 40% of thoughts would have been misclassified under the assumption that off-task thought is inherently freely moving. Overall, freedom of movement appears to be an independent dimension of thought that is not captured by the two most common measures of mind wandering. Future work focusing on the dynamics of thought may be crucial for improving our understanding of the wandering mind.
Although central to well-being, functional and dysfunctional thoughts arise and unfold over time in ways that remain poorly understood. To shed light on these mechanisms, we adapted a "think aloud" ...paradigm to quantify the content and dynamics of individuals' thoughts at rest. Across two studies, external raters hand coded the content of each thought and computed dynamic metrics spanning duration, transition probabilities between affective states, and conceptual similarity over time. Study 1 highlighted the paradigm's high ecological validity and revealed a narrowing of conceptual scope following more negative content. Study 2 replicated Study 1's findings and examined individual difference predictors of trait brooding, a maladaptive form of rumination. Across individuals, increased trait brooding was linked to thoughts rated as more negative, past-oriented and self-focused. Longer negative and shorter positive thoughts were also apparent as brooding increased, as well as a tendency to shift away from positive conceptual states, and a stronger narrowing of conceptual scope following negative thoughts. Importantly, content and dynamics explained independent variance, accounting for a third of the variance in brooding. These results uncover a real-time cognitive signature of rumination and highlight the predictive and ecological validity of the think aloud paradigm applied to resting state cognition.
While recent neurocognitive theories have proposed links between dreams and waking life, it remains unclear what kinds of waking thoughts are most similar in their phenomenological characteristics to ...those of dreams. To investigate this question and examine relevance of dreams to significant personal concerns and dispositional mental health traits, we employed ecological momentary assessment and trait questionnaires across 719 young adults who completed the study during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time marked by considerable societal concern. Across the group and at the level of individual differences, dreams showed the highest correspondence with task-unrelated thoughts. Participants who self-reported greater COVID-19 concern rated their dreams as more negative and unconstructive, a relationship which was moderated by trait rumination. Furthermore, dreams perceived as more negative unconstructive and immersive in nature associated with increased trait rumination beyond variation in rumination explained by waking task-unrelated thoughts alone. Together, these results point to similarities between perceived characteristics of dreams and task-unrelated thoughts, and support a relationship between dreams, current concerns, and mental health.
Iconic representations are ubiquitous; they fill children’s cartoons, add humor to newspapers, and bring emotional tone to online communication. Yet, the communicative function they serve remains ...unaddressed by cognitive psychology. Here, we examined the hypothesis that iconic representations communicate emotional information more efficiently than their realistic counterparts. In Experiment 1, we manipulated low-level features of emotional faces to create five sets of stimuli that ranged from photorealistic to fully iconic. Participants identified emotions on briefly presented faces. Results showed that, at short presentation times, accuracy for identifying emotion on more “cartoonized” images was enhanced. In addition, increasing contrast and decreasing featural complexity benefited accuracy. In Experiment 2, we examined an event-related potential component, the P1, which is sensitive to low-level visual stimulus features. Lower levels of contrast and complexity within schematic stimuli were also associated with lower P1 amplitudes. These findings support the hypothesis that iconic representations differ from realistic images in their ability to communicate specific information, including emotion, quickly and efficiently, and that this effect is driven by changes in low-level visual features in the stimuli.
Humans constantly experience content in their stream of consciousness. The light never stops shining in our minds, whether we create a mental representation of part of our environment, focus on an ...emotion, or internally-generated content. The stream of consciousness has mostly been studied in the context of predefined tasks. Less is known about aspects of our daily life that are characterized by having little or nothing in particular to pay attention to (e.g., taking a shower, walking around, or lying lazily on the beach), situations of minimal attentional demands. Though there is theoretical interest in the relationship between mental health and the content of the stream of consciousness as well as the dynamics characterizing the rise and fall of such content occurring in such moments, there has been little empirical work investigating this relationship. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore whether the content and dynamics of the stream of consciousness occurring in situations of minimal attentional demands differ based on personality traits and mental health status. In Chapter 1, we first provide evidence of the validity of the Think Aloud paradigm as a method to quantify the content and dynamics of the stream of consciousness during a 10-minute resting state task and then demonstrate the usefulness of such metrics to predict individual differences in brooding tendencies, drawing a cognitive profile of the experience of brooders when left alone with their thoughts. Using the same paradigm, Chapter 2 further supports the usefulness of quantifying the content and dynamics of the stream of consciousness by identifying differences predictive of participants’ creative potential. Finally, Chapter 3 revealed similarity between the phenomenology of the stream of consciousness in two different low attentional demand situations, dreams and mind wandering, and explored their putative relationship with current concerns. Results from this body of work highlight the importance of studying the stream of consciousness in situations of minimal attentional demands.
Thoughts are an essential part of the human experience, yet our understanding of thoughts is rather limited. In this study, we resurrect an old methodology to study experts, the think aloud, to ...investigate the stream of consciousness of 94 participants. Advantages of the think aloud include that it samples many consecutively occurring thoughts in a short amount of time and provides access to the entirety of the content. In the first section, the think aloud methodology is compared to other existing methodologies and shown replicate previous findings obtained through competing methods such as experience sampling or retrospective questionnaires. Thoughts sampled with the think aloud replicated the well-established prospective bias (tendency to have thought oriented towards the future) as well as relationships between characteristics of thoughts in trait negativity, rumination, and mindfulness. The second section explores a new aspect of thought, the dynamics with which they unravel, and its potential relationship with mental health. Indices of dynamics explored here, the average length of a thought, was not predictive of ADHD nor depression, but had a relationship with rumination, albeit in the opposite direction of what was predicted. Finally, the think aloud was tested to determine what the characteristics of creative individuals’ thoughts are. Little evidence was found for the theoretically predicted tripartite sets of relationship between creativity, mind wandering, and exploration. Creative individuals were characterized by being more loquacious during the think aloud task, having longer thoughts on average, and thinking about more negative content. Overall, this research presented here demonstrates both the validity and usefulness of the think aloud task in the study of thought.
Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their external world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their inner mental life, ...especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the hypothesis that creative individuals are more engaged with their idle thoughts and more associative in the dynamic transitions between them. Study 1 captured the real-time conscious experiences of 81 adults as they voiced aloud the content of their mind moment-by-moment across a 10-minute unconstrained baseline period. Higher originality scores on a divergent thinking task were associated with less perceived boredom, more words spoken overall, more freely moving thoughts, and more loosely-associative (as opposed to sharp) transitions during the baseline rest period. In Study 2, across 2,612 participants, those who reported higher self-rated creativity also reported less perceived boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time during which many people experienced unusually extended periods of unstructured free time. Overall, these results suggest a tendency for creative individuals to be more engaged and explorative with their thoughts when task demands are relaxed, raising implications for resting state functional MRI and societal trends to devalue idle time.
PDF
