Throughout their everyday life, most people engage in many activities that require varying degrees of attention. As they take part in these activities, the brain processes the sensory information it receives from their surroundings, creating representations that guide their current and future behavior.

In similar situations, different people can experience varying levels of engagement and interest. Individuals diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are known to struggle to focus their attention on things for prolonged periods, often experiencing feelings of boredom in a wide range of situations.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and other institutions in Germany recently set out to explore the relationship between the perception of sensory information and boredom, both in individuals diagnosed with ADHD and those who are not. Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that a reduced perception of sensory stimuli is linked to higher levels of boredom in people with and without ADHD.

“The perception of sensory information and subsequent responses, such as boredom, vary across situations and individuals, as impressively depicted by patients with attentional disorders who show extensive boredom across many situations,” wrote Johannes P.-H. Seiler, Jonas Elpelt and their colleagues in their paper.

“Despite these implications, it remains unclear how environmental features and individual traits act together to allow effective transmission of sensory information, and how both factors relate to boredom experience. We present a framework to address this issue, exposing human participants to text stimuli with defined objective information content while assessing their perceived information, boredom and text sentiment.”

Seiler, Elpelt and their colleagues recruited 142 students without ADHD from the University of Mainz, as well as 19 patients diagnosed with ADHD, who took part in two similar experiments. Firstly, the study participants were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to collect their demographic information, as well as assess their personality traits and other psychological qualities.

Subsequently, they completed a task devised by the researchers, which required them to read five short texts on the same topic, varying in their semantic diversity and word repetitions. The participants were asked to rate how informative, boring, creative, pleasant and arousing they found each of the texts on a scale from 1 to 7.

In addition, they completed other tasks, including a language-based divergent thinking task, as well as auditory tasks in which they were asked to rate the similarity between different white noise stimuli, while also rating their degree of boredom. The researchers analyzed all the data they collected to determine whether there was a link between the participants’ perception of sensory information during these tasks and the extent to which they felt bored.

“Using information theory to formalize external and internal factors of information transmission, we find that lower information transmission predicts higher boredom,” wrote the researchers.

“Moreover, individuals with ADHD show lower information transmission, compared to a control sample. Together, delineating the interaction of sensory information content with individual traits, boredom emerges as a situational consequence of reduced information-decoding, heightened in ADHD.”

The results gathered by Seiler, Elpelt and their colleagues suggest that the extent to which individuals were perceptive to stimuli in their environment was related to the boredom they experienced, irrespective of whether they had ADHD or not. Nonetheless, people diagnosed with ADHD exhibited a reduced sensitivity to external stimuli, which is consistent with previous findings.

In addition, the researchers found correlations between people’s perceptions of sensory information and both their individual traits and external features. In the future, their study could potentially inform the development of new interventions designed to improve people’s engagement with educational or other activities.

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