Not so average: Heterogeneous boredom dynamics during an incremental physical effort task

Boredom is a dynamic state that promotes task disengagement and behavioral change. Despite the centrality of temporal dynamics in boredom conceptualizations, little empirical work has examined how it unfolds during sustained performance and how these dynamics relate to behavior. Here, we tracked boredom, alongside physical and cognitive effort, throughout an incremental cycling task performed until voluntary disengagement, and decomposed individual trajectories using functional principal component analysis (fPCA). Whereas physical and cognitive effort increased largely uniformly, boredom showed pronounced interindividual variability in boredom levels and temporal trends. Boredom trend, but not boredom level predicted performance: greater alignment with decreasing (rather than increasing) boredom trends predicted longer persistence, even after controlling for perceived physical and cognitive effort. Thus, this study offers initial empirical evidence that boredom is not an ‘average’ experience but a dynamic process whose unfolding varies systematically across individuals and relates to task persistence. Tracking such dynamics illustrates how temporal modeling can advance the understanding and theoretical treatment of how boredom shapes task engagement.