Reward sensitivity following boredom and cognitive effort: A high-powered neurophysiological investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What do people feel like doing after they have exerted cognitive effort or are bored? Here, we empirically test whether people are drawn to rewards (at the neural level) following cognitive effort and boredom. This elucidates the experiences and consequences of engaging in cognitive effort, and compares it to the consequences of experiencing boredom, an affective state with predicted similar motivational consequences. Event-related potentials were recorded after participants (N=243) were randomized into one of three conditions – boredom (passively observing strings of numbers), cognitive effort (adding 3 to each digit of a four-digit number), or control. In the subsequent task, we focused on the feedback negativity (FN) to assess the brain’s immediate response to the presence or absence of reward. Phenomenologically, participants in the boredom condition reported more fatigue than those in the cognitive effort condition, despite reporting exerting less effort. Results suggest participants in the boredom condition exhibited larger FN amplitude than participants in the control condition, while the cognitive effort condition was neither different from boredom nor control. The neural and methodological implications for ego depletion research, including issues of replicability, are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".