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Interoceptive Processing in Boredom Proneness: Sensing Without Making Sense

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Boredom proneness has been linked to a disrupted relationship with one's internal states, yet themechanism underlying this disruption remains unclear. One possibility is that this disruptionreflects a difficulty in translating interoceptive signals into meaningful predictions about internalstates, rather than a basic failure to detect them. Across two studies, we examined whether thisdisrupted relationship reflects interpretive challenges, a deficit in cardiac interoceptive accuracy,or both. Study 1 (N = 124) was a direct replication confirming that highly boredom proneindividuals report attending intensely to bodily sensations while struggling to interpret them — apattern that held across a combined sample of 350 adults and yielded moderate-to-strongcorrelations with established measures of self-focused attention and interoceptive sensoryconfusion. Study 2 (N = 121) administered a heartbeat counting task to determine whether thisdisrupted relationship was due to deficient interoceptive processing or interpretive failure.Boredom proneness was unrelated to objective heartbeat counting accuracy but remainedassociated with self-reported interoceptive sensory confusion. Converging with Study 1, thispattern suggests that boredom proneness is best characterized by a difficulty in interpreting internalsignals than by a basic interoceptive perceptual deficit. Together, these findings are consistent withpredictive processing accounts of boredom proneness where those high in trait boredom struggleto generate meaningful predictions from interoceptive cues. Whether this dissociation betweenself-reported and objective cardiac interoception generalizes across different measurementapproaches and populations remains an open question that future work could examine using moresensitive interoceptive tasks and trial-level prediction error metrics.
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/8fprj_v1
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223203236
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