Boredom and Our Sense of Time

Although we all experience boredom, the scientific study of boredom is relatively new. In fact, the first journal dedicated to this topic (the Journal of Boredom Studies) published its inaugural issue just last year. One of the things that makes boredom challenging to study is that it does not exactly fit the category of cognition or the category of emotion, but seems to involve a complex interaction between cognition and emotion. Although boredom is certainly task-dependent (you will be more likely to experience it in a waiting room as opposed to a theme park), it also depends critically on a person's state of mind and attitude. The same period of time can be experienced by one person as boredom and by another person as a relaxing time to think.

One of the most intuitive aspects of boredom is that time seems to pass slower when we are bored. A 15-minute period waiting in line may feel like an eternity if you are bored, but it might seem to pass by quickly if you are chatting with a friend. A study published by Joanna Witowska and colleagues published in 2020 established this link between boredom and time perception. In their study, participants spent 7.5 minutes alone in a closed room with no devices, not knowing how long they would have to wait. After 7.5 minutes, they reported their impressions of the waiting time and answered other questions about their state of mind. The researchers found that the more bored participants reported being, the more they tended to think about time, and the slower time seemed to pass to them (although boredom did not correlate directly with participants' estimates of how much time had passed).

A new study by Corinna Martarelli and colleagues published in this month's issue of Cognition and Emotion sought to investigate a potential causal link between time perception and boredom by testing whether manipulating time perception could lead to changes in boredom. Participants in the VR study visited three virtual waiting rooms where virtual clocks moved at different speeds. They spent exactly four minutes in each room, but in the "fast room" the virtual clock hand moved 20% faster than normal, in the "slow room" it moved 20% slower than normal, and in the "normal room" it moved at normal speed. After spending time in each waiting room, participants answered a series of questions, including ones about boredom, mind wandering, and the passage of time.

The researchers found that the subjective perception of time was highly correlated with boredom: states of higher boredom were associated with a subjective slowing down of time. However, they did not find the predicted relationships between the clock speed and time perception or boredom. Apparently, merely showing sped-up or slowed-down clocks may not be a sufficiently strong manipulation to alter time perception and related states of mind. Future studies that wish to investigate this causal link may need to use other approaches to manipulate time perception, such as the availability of internal sensations (e.g. one's heartbeat and breathing) that are thought to be involved in the perception of time.