Effects of Task Duration Prediction Errors on Affective State and Performance

Why does performing repetitive cognitive tasks negatively impacts our mood? While this question is fundamental to the understanding of human behavior, little is known about this decline. Here we examine whether performing longer-than, versus shorter-than-expected tasks influence our affective state and effort investment. In five experiments (n=628) participants learned expectations about the duration of a visuomotor task, and subsequently, learned that they would need to complete a task of shorter, longer, or equal duration relative to these expectations. Across experiments, we observed that experiencing a shorter-than-expected task duration (PE+) consistently improved participants’ self-reported affective state, whereas experiencing a longer-than-expected task block (a PE-) worsened participants’ affective state. We also observed that experiencing a PE+ improved task performance (relative to PE-), though this effect was not consistently observed across experiments. Together, these results suggest that our mood states accompanying the performance of strenuous tasks, and to an extent, effort investment, can be altered simply through task duration expectations.