Measuring the psychophysical and EEG signature of boredom.

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Boredom is a ubiquitous human experience associated with a raft of negative outcomes, from increased depression and anxiety to problems with drugs of addiction and gambling. Our lab explores the cognitive, psychophysical and neural bases of the experience of boredom and the association with individual traits in those high in boredom proneness. The requested equipment is needed for the psychophysical and neural aspects of my successfully funded NSERC Discovery program (I was also awarded DAS and DND Supplements which will fund two Postdoctoral Fellows in the lab - see Budget Justification for details). ******A long standing debate in the boredom literature concerns the nature of the physiological signature of the experience. Some claim boredom is a high arousal experience while other claim it to be a low arousal state approximating (physiologically) sleep. We initially came down on the high arousal camp (Merrifield & Danckert, 2014), but recent work in the lab suggests that boredom should best be considered both high and low arousal (Danckert et al., 2018). The latter work was based on self-reports of boredom, restlessness and sleepiness in conditions intended to be either boring or engaging. What is needed now is a dynamic measure of the psychophysics associated with boredom. We expect to first replicate our earlier finding that boredom is associated with higher heart rate and lower skin conductance levels, before using more specific measures (Pre-ejection phase and heart rate variability) to probe the nature of the psychophysical signature of boredom over time.******Very few studies have examined the EEG signature related to boredom. In one (Santesso et al., 2008), boredom susceptibility was associated with an asymmetry of frontal alpha band power. We have recently explored this kind of measure in children aged 9 to 14 years (in collaboration with Dr. Teena Willoughby at Brock University) and find that frontal theta power differentiates between those high and low in boredom proneness, whereas posterior sites differentiate the high and low boredom prone in the alpha band. We are requesting equipment to probe these relations in healthy young adults using both resting state EEG and task-related event-related potentials that will interrogate the relation between boredom and executive control.******Finally, to our knowledge no study has examined the relation between the psychophysical and electrophysiological signatures of the experience of boredom and the association with trait boredom proneness. The combination of psychophysical and EEG measures that would be enabled by this RTI would lead to huge advances in our understanding of this consequential, and hitherto understudied, human experience.