Decision Revise: How Effortful is Boredom? Studying Self-Control Demands Through Pupillometry. Round#3

Effective effort regulation is central to self-control and has been a focus of psychological research for many decades.It is well established that challenging cognitive tasks, which impose self-control demands due to their complexity, are perceived as more effortful and require greater physiological activation than simpler tasks.However, the experience and allocation of effort during a task, whether easy or difficult, might not solely depend on inherent self-control demands.Another key factor is boredom, which can arise during task execution.Yet, the role of boredom and its interplay with perceived task difficulty over time remain underexamined.Radtke et al. ( 2025) examined how boredom and task difficulty jointly influence subjective and objective measures of effort, using two Stroop variants (easy: congruent-only; hard: mixed).Thought probes tracked subjective boredom and difficulty, as well as effort attributed to boredom and difficulty.Pupillometry (tonic and phasic pupil size) indexed physiological effort allocation, and a subsequent flanker task assessed secondary task performance.Boredom was higher in the easy Stroop and, critically, effort attributed to boredom increased more strongly in this condition.A preregistered key question was whether tonic and phasic (stimulus-evoked) pupil dilation would be better predicted when effort attributed to boredom was included alongside effort attributed to task difficulty.The preregistered analyses yielded mixed results and did not uniformly support this prediction.An exploratory, non-preregistered extension of the analyses, however, yielded post hoc support that effort attributed to boredom and difficulty are differentially associated with physiological measures of effort across task conditions.While preliminary, this study makes a good case that boredom-and difficulty-related effort are facets of subjective effort appraisals that reflect partially separable motivational processes.Accordingly,