Comparing Mental Effort, Difficulty, and Confidence Appraisals in Problem-Solving: A Metacognitive Perspective

Abstract

It is well established in educational research that metacognitive monitoring of performance assessed by self-reports, for instance, asking students to report their confidence in provided answers, is based on heuristic cues rather than on actual success in the task. Subjective self-reports are also used in educational research on cognitive load, where they refer to the perceived amount of mental effort invested in or difficulty of each task item. In the present study, we examined the potential underlying bases and the predictive value of mental effort and difficulty appraisals compared to confidence appraisals by applying metacognitive concepts and paradigms. In three experiments, participants faced verbal logic problems or one of two non-verbal reasoning tasks. In a between-participants design, each task item was followed by either mental effort, difficulty, or confidence appraisals. We examined the associations between the various appraisals, response time, and success rates. Consistently across all experiments, we found that mental effort and difficulty appraisals were associated more strongly than confidence with response time. Further, while all appraisals were highly predictive of solving success, the strength of this association was stronger for difficulty and confidence appraisals (which were similar) than for mental effort appraisals. We conclude that mental effort and difficulty appraisals are prone to misleading cues like other metacognitive judgments and are based on unique underlying processes. These findings challenge the accepted notion that mental effort appraisals can serve as reliable reflections of cognitive load.

Metacognitive Effort Regulation across Cultures

“…Comparing results for groups who are vs. are not asked to reflect on their performance across cultures may provide new insights into the issue of reactivity in the context of metareasoning research. Furthermore, Hoch et al ( 2023 ) compared metacognitive judgments of effort to judgments of difficulty and confidence in several problem-solving tasks, including the MTT. Interestingly, effort and difficulty judgments were more strongly associated with the time invested in each task item while confidence was more strongly associated with success in those items.…”

When is Learning “Effortful”? Scrutinizing the Concept of Mental Effort in Cognitively Oriented Research from a Motivational Perspective

“…In the following, we use the distinction between data-driven and goal-driven factors of effort experience and allocation (Baars et al, 2020;Koriat et al, 2006Koriat et al, , 2014 as a starting point to elaborate on a three-fold effort conception that we use to illustrate the tension between motivational and cognitive conceptions of effort. According to Hoch et al (2023), goal-driven effort refers to the mental effort an individual decided (or is willing) to invest (see also Scheiter et al, 2020), whereas data-driven effort refers to the mental effort an individual faces while dealing with task requirements. However, beyond this useful distinction, the term effort has at least three fundamentally different meanings-both in psychological research and in the lay world-that often get mixed up but should be clearly separated.…”

“…or, more ambivalently for a layperson, by "How much effort do/did you have to invest in order to solve the task?" (cf., Hoch et al, 2023).…”

“…Notably, when tasks are perceived as either subjectively very complex, highly aversive, or both, it requires good reasons and a certain kind of optimism to face these difficulties and to persist in deliberate cognitive operations. This assumption brings us to a third conception of effort, reflected also in the goal-driven effort interpretation (Hoch et al, 2023;Koriat et al, 2006) or the distinction between active and passive cognitive load (Klepsch & Seufert, 2021). In this conception, effort refers to the initiation, intensity, and persistence of learning-related behavior (i.e., effort-by-allocation in Table 1), as a direct outcome of momentary motivation (e.g., Salomon, 1984;Schnotz et al, 2009).…”

“…Such differentiation may enrich cognitively oriented research because cognitive load appraisals, as the most common approach to operationalize mental effort (e.g., Scheiter et al, 2020), are seen to reflect the cognitive resources allocated or invested by the learning individual to accommodate task demands (e.g., Hoch et al, 2023). Yet, this conception inherently intertwines motivational processes-determining for example the selection and persistence of behavior as well as its affective-emotional quality (Rheinberg et al, 2000;-and the actual cognitive learning processes, without explicating the conceptual and methodological implications of this blending.…”