Satiation or Boredom? A Rejoinder to Dr. Barmack

What's so boring about vigilance?

“…Although most participants stopped before reaching an experimenterimposed 60-min limit, they still reported feelings of boredom. Thus, these results are at odds with Barmack (1939), who argued that individuals would stop performing a task when they became satiated, prior to the onset of boredom. The overall TBS scores reflected moderate levels of boredom for the vigilance task and low levels of boredom for the kaleidoscope task.…”

“…On the whole, the pattern of results observed by Scerbo and Sawin (1994) appears to contradict Barmack's (1939) notions and provide support for the independence of satiation and boredom as claimed by Berman (1939). However, Scerbo and Sawin argued that there may have been another mechanism at work that affected these results.…”

“…Thus, Barmack argued that satiation was a precursor to boredom. On the other hand, Berman (1939) claimed that boredom and satiation were distinct but similar processes. Berman argued that one could provide separate estimates of boredom and satiation for a given task.…”

“…To test these ideas, Scerbo and Sawin (1994) had participants rate their boredom after each activity. According to Barmack (1939), if individuals are given the opportunity to terminate the activity at will, then their estimates of boredom for both tasks should be similar because they should stop performing the tasks when they reach their satiation point, presumably before they become bored. On the other hand, if boredom and satiation are separate processes as Berman (1939) argued, then the subjective ratings of the two tasks may be independent of when an individual chooses to terminate the task.…”