What is the feeling of effort about?

Abstract

For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether it makes sense to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the feeling of effort. To advance towards a general theory, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the expected costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the expected costs of a bodily action. Through this talk I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also discuss how the single view can help us in defining efforts themselves.

What is mental effort: a clinical perspective

“…These direct and indirect accounts invite a theoretical discussion as to whether it is truly the case that the experience of effort is caused by cognitive work. This representationalist or 'effort-first' (11,63,65) assumption is intuitively compelling, drawing on the notion that our subjective experience represents -directly or indirectly -the mental work being done, perhaps by monitoring the activity itself or by receiving some signal related to resource depletion or by-product accumulation. However, there is also a 'feeling-first' perspective that does not see effort as representing an activity or its downstream effects (11,63,65).…”

“…This representationalist or 'effort-first' (11,63,65) assumption is intuitively compelling, drawing on the notion that our subjective experience represents -directly or indirectly -the mental work being done, perhaps by monitoring the activity itself or by receiving some signal related to resource depletion or by-product accumulation. However, there is also a 'feeling-first' perspective that does not see effort as representing an activity or its downstream effects (11,63,65). Instead, effort is defined purely in subjective terms and activities are deemed effortful insofar as they are accompanied by these subjective experiences.…”

Efforts and their feelings

“…have common without relying on the representational contents of those feelings. Adopting a choice-based approach, Bermúdez (2022) proposes that this unifying feature is the role they play in guiding action selection: they motivate agents to disengage from the current action. A second problem is this.…”

“…Feeling-first approaches propose that efforts must be defined by reference to feelings of effort. Bermúdez (2022) argues for a feeling-first approach, defining efforts as actions that are accompanied by an experience of effort. 3 The feeling-first approach could be combined with any substantive theory of the feeling of effort to produce specific definitions of Thus, combined with e.g.…”

“…Seen independently, each account has strengths and drawbacks. Opportunity‐cost accounts could unify the phenomenology of effort in both mental and bodily action, by appealing to a general‐purpose cost‐benefit calculator for both mental and physical costs (Bermúdez, 2022). Supportive evidence comes from studies suggesting a large overlap in brain areas underlying expected‐cost calculations for both mental and physical actions (Chong et al., 2017).…”