No abstract

When deciding between different courses of action, both the potential outcomes and the costs of making a choice should be considered. These costs include the cognitive and physical effort of the different options. In many decision contexts, the outcome of the choice is guaranteed but the amount of effort required to achieve that outcome is unknown. Here, we studied choices between options that varied in the riskiness of the effort (number of responses) required. People made repeated choices between pairs of options that required them to click different numbers of sequentially presented response circles. Easy-effort options led to small numbers of response circles, whereas hard-effort options led to larger numbers of response circles. For both easy-and hard-effort options, fixed options led to a consistent effort, whereas risky options led to variable effort that, with a 50/50 chance, required either more effort or less effort than the fixed option. Participants who showed a preference for easier over harder options were more risk averse for decisions involving hard options than for decisions involving easy options. On subsequent memory tests, people most readily recalled the hardest outcome, and they overestimated its frequency of occurrence. Memory for the effort associated with each risky option strongly correlated with individual risky preferences for both easy-effort and hard-effort choices. These results suggest a relationship between memory biases and risky choice for effort similar to that found in risky choice for reward. With effort, the hardest work seems to particularly stand out.

Decision-making involves weighing up the outcome likelihood, potential rewards, and effort needed. Previous research has focused on the trade-offs between risk and reward or between effort and reward. Here we bridge this gap and examine how risk in effort levels influences choice. With outcome uncertainty, people’s risk attitudes follow a fourfold pattern, varying with the domain (gains or losses) and probability (rare or common). Three experiments assessed people’s risk attitudes for money, physical effort, and mental effort. With monetary gambles, risk attitudes followed the classic fourfold pattern, and people were risk averse for increases in money (gains). With both physical and mental effort, however, people exhibited a “flipped” fourfold pattern of risk preferences and were instead risk seeking for increases in effort. Overall, these findings indicate that people treat effort as a loss of resources and are more willing to take risks to avoid potentially high levels of effort.

Over the last two decades, nearly one hundred studies have been published examining reward influences on memory. Implementations of reward-value procedures have varied markedly, as have other study characteristics, including images vs. words, intentional vs. incidental memory encoding, and recall vs. recognition tests. As such, the resulting state of the field has become unwieldy and somewhat difficult to identify consistent reward-memory effects from those that are inconsistent due to critical differences in the study methods. Here we provide an overview of these studies and fractionate their methods into three distinct procedures: instructed, item-related feedback, and item-unrelated feedback. Instructed studies tell participants of item-value associations during encoding with rewards earned during memory retrieval. In contrast, feedback studies ask participants to make responses during encoding, with rewards provided as feedback; memory retrieval itself is unrewarded. Some feedback studies require participants to make responses related to the to-be-remembered items, while others require participants to respond to an initial prompt before presenting an unrelated stimulus. While both procedures involve feedback, the first set of studies involves item-related feedback, and the second set has item-unrelated feedback. By fractionating the reward-memory literature into distinct procedures, an otherwise heterogenous mixture of study design characteristics becomes much more interpretable and the underlying cognitive mechanisms more clear. This additional clarity should improve predictions for future studies, as this framework helps identify which prior findings are more relevant, while also providing a summary of the current state of the field.