Rewarding cognitive effort increases the intrinsic value of mental labor

Clay, Georgia; Mlynski, Christopher; Korb, Franziska M.; Goschke, Thomas; Job, Veronika

doi:10.1073/pnas.2111785119

Cited by 46 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Dunn et al, 2019). Crucially, even though effort itself can sometimes be rewarding (Inzlicht et al, 2018) and even invigorating (Milyavskaya et al, 2021), effort avoidance only terminates when effort is adequately compensated with reward (Clay et al, 2022; Devine & Otto, 2021; Kool & Botvinick, 2014).…”

Section: Cognitive Effort Avoidancementioning

confidence: 99%

Do humans prefer cognitive effort over doing nothing?

Wu¹,

Ferguson²,

Inzlicht³

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Humans and other animals find mental (and physical) effort aversive and have the fundamental drive to avoid it. However, doing nothing is also aversive. Here, we ask whether people choose to avoid effort when the alternative is to do nothing at all. Across 12 studies, participants completed variants of the demand selection task, in which they repeatedly selected between a cognitively effortful task (e.g., simple addition, Stroop task, and symbol-counting task) and a task that required no effort (e.g., doing nothing, watching the computer complete the Stroop, and symbol-viewing). We then tabulated people's choices. Across our studies and an internal meta-analysis, we found little evidence that people choose to avoid effort (and hints that people sometimes prefer effort) when the alternative was doing nothing. Our findings suggest that doing nothing can be just as costly-if not more costly-than exerting effort.

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Section: Cognitive Effort Avoidancementioning

confidence: 99%

Do humans prefer cognitive effort over doing nothing?

Wu¹,

Ferguson²,

Inzlicht³

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…Whether force could have acted as a motivating factor raises another important possible reason why our effort manipulation did not succeed as predicted. In a series of innovative experiments addressing the effort paradox (see Introduction ), Clay and colleagues [ 32 ], gave their participants a challenging training task (i.e., a working memory test) requiring substantial cognitive effort. In the treatment condition, participants were rewarded proportionally to how much effort they put into the training task (and not by success or failure in doing the memory task).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does decision confidence reflect effort?

2023

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Goal directed behaviour requires transformation of sensory input to decision, and then to output action. How the sensory input is accumulated to form the decision has been extensively studied, however, the influence of output action on decision making has been largely dismissed. Although the recent emerging view postulates the reciprocal interaction between action and decision, still little is known about how the parameters of an action modulates the decision. In this study, we focused on the physical effort which necessarily entails with action. We tested if the physical effort during the deliberation period of the perceptual decision, not the effort required after deciding a particular option, can impact on the process of forming the decision. Here, we set up an experimental situation where investing effort is necessary for the initiation of the task, but importantly, is orthogonal to success in task performance. The study was pre-registered to test the hypothesis that the increased effort will decrease the metacognitive accuracy of decision, without affecting the decision accuracy. Participants judged the direction of a random-dot motion stimuli, while holding and maintaining the position of a robotic manipulandum with their right hand. In the key experimental condition, the manipulandum produced force to move away from its position, requiring the participants to resist the force while accumulating the sensory evidence for the decision. The decision was reported by a key-press using the left-hand. We found no evidence that such incidental (i.e., non-instrumental) effort may influence the subsequent decision process and most importantly decision confidence. The possible reason for this result and the future direction of the research are discussed.

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“…However, there is little stopping a participant from trying less in harder difficulties as performance was not incentivised in our experiments. The use of physiological measures of effort such as heart rate (Clay et al, 2022) and pupil dilation (van der Wel & Steenbergen, 2018) may therefore be useful additions to future work. In Experiment 4 we asked participants to rate how effortful each task was to attain a more direct measure of effort (compared to inferring effort from accuracy and response times).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is All Mental Effort Equal? The Role of Cognitive Demand-Type on Effort Avoidance

Embrey¹,

Donkin²,

Newell³

2022

Preprint

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Humans are often termed “cognitive misers” for their aversion to mental effort. Both in and outside the laboratory people often show preference for low-effort tasks and are willing to forgo financial reward to avoid more demanding alternatives. Mental effort, however, does not seem to be ubiquitously avoided: people play crosswords, board games, and read novels, all as forms of leisure. While such activities undoubtedly require effort, the type of cognitive demands they impose appear markedly different from the tasks typically used in mental-effort research (e.g., N-Back, demand selection tasks, vigilance tasks). We investigate the effect disparate demands such as rule discovery compared to rule implementation have on people’s aversion to or preference for increased mental effort. Across four experiments using three different tasks (i.e., N-Back, number sequence problems, and anagrams), and a mixture of online and lab-based settings we find that aversion to effort remains stable regardless of the types of cognitive demands a task imposes. The results are discussed in terms of other factors that might induce the pursuit of mental effort over and above the type of cognitive activity involved in a task.

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Rewarding cognitive effort increases the intrinsic value of mental labor

Cited by 46 publications

References 40 publications

Do humans prefer cognitive effort over doing nothing?

Do humans prefer cognitive effort over doing nothing?

Does decision confidence reflect effort?

Is All Mental Effort Equal? The Role of Cognitive Demand-Type on Effort Avoidance

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