Figure 2.

Boredom bias of monotony avoidance in the Boredom Choice Task: (A) Choice behavior of one exemplary subject in the visual and auditory monotonous vs. variable (Mon–Var) BCT cycle. The cumulative number of choices for either alternative is plotted over the respective trial. (B) Average raw boredom bias of all participants from Experiment Ia-c (n = 142 participants for visual modality, n = 102 participants for auditory modality) over the duration of each task cycle across all conditions. The raw boredom bias is computed in a bin of 15 trials (first bin: trial 1–15) which is then shifted stepwise until the end of the task (last bin: trial 286–300). The vertical bars indicate the standard error of the mean. (C) Boxplots with the distributions of the adjusted boredom bias for Experiment Ia (n = 49 participants), Ib (n = 53 participants) and Ic (n = 40 participants). The red line indicates the median, the box indicates the upper and lower 25% quantiles and the whiskers indicate the 50% quantiles around the median. Blue colors reflect visual task cycles, whereas green colors represent auditory task cycles. In all experiments the Mon–Var distributions were significantly different from a mean of zero (***p < 0.001 in one-sample t tests).