On the misery of cognitive effort

Abstract

The effect of cognitive effort on mood is unclear. Expending cognitive effort is generally avoided but expenditure of cognitive effort is the primary feature of some popular recreational activities, such as sudoku or video games. However, one common confound is that previous studies mostly looked into mood changes before and after cognitive effort manipulation. Therefore, it is unknown what im- mediate impact cognitive effort has on momentary mood. To investigate this, in two studies, we used a letter sorting paradigm to test whether momentary mood ratings change with different levels of experimentally manipulated task difficulty. In study 1 (N = 105), we found that increased difficulty, and consequently cogni- tive effort, leads to more errors and lower mood ratings. In study 2 (N = 210), we replicated our results from study 1 and further demonstrated that cognitive effort influences mood independently from immediate reward. In conclusion, controlling for reward conditions, we found that cognitive effort reduces people’s moment to moment mood.

Context Effects in Cognitive Effort Evaluation

“…An interesting question raised by these results concerns the potential mechanism(s) underlying the observed assimilation effects. A possible explanation may be that performing the high-demand task may induce a negative affective state (e.g., frustration), resulting in the highdemand context being evaluated more negatively, and therefore, more effortful (Chen et al, 2023). It is possible that cognitive fatigue may play a role in these contextually-bound evaluations of stimuli, such that during the Association Phase the high-demand context may engender greater cognitive fatigue, resulting in the medium-demand (level 2) task being perceived as more demanding in the high-demand context than the low-demand context, simply because participants were more fatigued in the high-demand context (Lorist et al, 2005).…”

“…Underling this point, individuals will choose to receive physical pain in order to avoid performing a demanding cognitive task (Vogel et al, 2020). Moreover, the experience of cognitive effort exertion is believed to carry disutility -that is, it feels aversive and costly (Chen et al, 2023;Devine et al, 2023). As epitomized by Hull's (1943) classic "law of less work" individuals, when given the choice, tend to favour less cognitively demanding over more demanding cognitive courses of action (Kool et al, 2010).…”