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Temporal dynamics of boredom during slot machine gambling

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Raymond Wu¹ (), Luke Clark¹; ¹The University of British Columbia

Boredom is a powerful cognitive-affective state that motivates action, signaling us to disengage from the current task and to switch to another task instead (Danckert & Elpidorou, 2023). People may gamble to alleviate boredom, and both boredom and gambling intensity may fluctuate with time-on-task. An ideal environment for studying these effects is within slot machine gambling, as a session-based form of gambling wherein players, on a continuous basis, choose their bet configuration and place a bet. We invited undergraduates to a “Casino Lab” (66 participants; 12,532 bets), where they freely played a slot machine task for 25 minutes. We used a simulated slot machine housed in a real slot machine case, and the modified game allowed us to collect boredom probes every 5 minutes. Despite monetary incentives and intense sensory feedback, boredom ratings increased as the session progressed (b = .17, p < .001); boredom increased when win percentages were low (b = .02, p = .004). Boredom was associated with a faster response latency. The association between boredom and response latency was positively moderated by time-on-task (interaction b = .16, p < .001) such that boredom early in the session was associated with a faster response, but boredom late in the session was associated with a slower response. Similar results were observed in a pilot sample that played on an authentic (i.e., real) slot machine (58 participants; 11,271 bets). Our findings illustrate the dynamic behavioral correlates of boredom during gambling in a peculiar environment engineered to be highly stimulating.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making