The Structure of Immersive and Engaging Activities: Insights From a Computational Model of Flow

Too often, people find their most important tasks tedious and tiresome. From going to the gym to getting through the workday, activities that ideally would feel immersive and engaging often feel anything but. How can tasks be designed to foster more engagement and less boredom? Answering this question requires a deep, mechanistic understanding of how the subjective experience of immersion and engagement — commonly known as flow — relates to mental representations of task structure. Traditional theories of flow offer little insight into the relationship between flow and representations of task structure, posing an obstacle to harnessing flow in daily life. In the present chapter, we address this obstacle by proposing a computational framework for deriving precise predictions about flow across different task structure representations.