Interoceptive Processing in Boredom Proneness: Sensing Without Making Sense
Abstract
Boredom proneness has been linked to a disrupted relationship with one's internal states, yet the mechanism underlying this disruption remains unclear. One possibility is that this disruption reflects a difficulty in translating interoceptive signals into meaningful predictions about internal states, rather than a basic failure to detect them. Across two studies, we examined whether this disrupted relationship reflects interpretive challenges, a deficit in cardiac interoceptive accuracy, or both. Study 1 (N = 124) was a direct replication confirming that highly boredom prone individuals report attending intensely to bodily sensations while struggling to interpret them — a pattern that held across a combined sample of 350 adults and yielded moderate-to-strong correlations with established measures of self-focused attention and interoceptive sensory confusion. Study 2 (N = 121) administered a heartbeat counting task to determine whether this disrupted relationship was due to deficient interoceptive processing or interpretive failure. Boredom proneness was unrelated to objective heartbeat counting accuracy but remained associated with self-reported interoceptive sensory confusion. Converging with Study 1, this pattern suggests that boredom proneness is best characterized by a difficulty in interpreting internal signals than by a basic interoceptive perceptual deficit. Together, these findings are consistent with predictive processing accounts of boredom proneness where those high in trait boredom struggle to generate meaningful predictions from interoceptive cues. Whether this dissociation between self-reported and objective cardiac interoception generalizes across different measurement approaches and populations remains an open question that future work could examine using more sensitive interoceptive tasks and trial-level prediction error metrics.
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BibTeX
@misc{trudel2026interoceptive,
title = {{Interoceptive Processing in Boredom Proneness: Sensing Without Making Sense}},
author = {Chantal Trudel and James Danckert},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/8fprj_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8fprj_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Interoceptive Processing in Boredom Proneness: Sensing Without Making Sense
AU - Chantal Trudel
AU - James Danckert
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/8fprj_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8fprj_v1/
AB - Boredom proneness has been linked to a disrupted relationship with one's internal states, yet the mechanism underlying this disruption remains unclear. One possibility is that this disruption reflects a difficulty in translating interoceptive signals into meaningful predictions about internal states, rather than a basic failure to detect them. Across two studies, we examined whether this disrupted relationship reflects interpretive challenges, a deficit in cardiac interoceptive accuracy, or both. Study 1 (N = 124) was a direct replication confirming that highly boredom prone individuals report attending intensely to bodily sensations while struggling to interpret them — a pattern that held across a combined sample of 350 adults and yielded moderate-to-strong correlations with established measures of self-focused attention and interoceptive sensory confusion. Study 2 (N = 121) administered a heartbeat counting task to determine whether this disrupted relationship was due to deficient interoceptive processing or interpretive failure. Boredom proneness was unrelated to objective heartbeat counting accuracy but remained associated with self-reported interoceptive sensory confusion. Converging with Study 1, this pattern suggests that boredom proneness is best characterized by a difficulty in interpreting internal signals than by a basic interoceptive perceptual deficit. Together, these findings are consistent with predictive processing accounts of boredom proneness where those high in trait boredom struggle to generate meaningful predictions from interoceptive cues. Whether this dissociation between self-reported and objective cardiac interoception generalizes across different measurement approaches and populations remains an open question that future work could examine using more sensitive interoceptive tasks and trial-level prediction error metrics.
ER -