The Role of Event Asynchrony and Attentional Deficits on Task-Unrelated Thoughts in Vigilance: Implications for Workload and Boredom Proneness

The present study examined the impact of event asynchrony, task-unrelated thoughts, attentional deficits, and boredom proneness on vigilance performance. Each subject participated in two sessions, one with asynchronous background events and one with temporally regular background events. Subjects were assigned to three groups: (a) those diagnosed as possessing attention deficit disorder (ADD) during childhood, (b) those with a high potential of having attention deficit disorder during childhood, and (c) those with a low potential of possessing attention deficit disorder during childhood. Subjects were required to indicate their spontaneous and deliberate task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) during each vigilance session. Boredom proneness was measured to determine if this trait could distinguish between adults who do and do not possess ADD. Further, estimates of subjective workload were collected to explore their relationship with TUT production and subjective workload. Synchronous conditions produced a significantly greater number of hits than asynchronous conditions. Further, there were more deliberate TUTs produced during synchronous conditions. These results suggest that subjects may have learned to plan timeouts during the synchronous task and to daydream voluntarily. In addition, boredom proneness successfully differentiated between those with and without ADD. Subjects who were diagnosed with ADD were more susceptible to boredom than subjects without the disorder. These findings suggest that the Boredom Proneness Scale may prove to be a useful diagnostic tool for ADD.