Volition, Performance of a Boring Task and Time Estimation

Subjective intervals were obtained from 40 subjects (20 males, 20 females) who were assigned to a group with or without volition in which choice regarding task involvement was varied. Orthogonal to volition, half the subjects engaged in a boring task, half in an interesting task. Subjects assigned to the group with no volition displayed typical temporal behavior (an interesting task was judged as significantly shorter), while subjects in the group with volition showed no difference in protensity as a function of task quality, yielding the predicted interaction.