Carleton University, Canada.
University of Toronto, Canada.
Neuropsychologia. 2019 Feb 4;123:159-168. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.03.033. Epub 2018 Mar 27.
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.
人们在进行认知努力或感到无聊之后会想做什么？在这里，我们通过实证检验人们在认知努力和无聊之后是否会被奖励（在神经水平上）吸引。这阐明了从事认知努力的体验和后果，并将其与经历无聊（一种具有预测性类似动机后果的情感状态）的后果进行了比较。在参与者（N=243）被随机分配到三种条件之一（无聊、认知努力或控制）之后，记录了事件相关电位。在随后的任务中，我们专注于反馈负波（FN），以评估大脑对奖励存在或不存在的即时反应。从现象学上看，与认知努力组相比，无聊的参与者报告的疲劳感更强，尽管他们报告的努力程度较低。结果表明，与控制组相比，无聊的参与者表现出更大的 FN 幅度，而认知努力组与无聊组或控制组没有差异。讨论了对自我损耗研究的神经和方法学影响，包括可复制性问题。
