What matters in making demand-based decisions: Time alone or difficulty too?

Which task is easier, doing arithmetic problems of specified form for some specified duration, or carrying a bucket of specified weight over some specified distance? If it is possible to choose between the "more cognitive" task and the "more physical" task, how are the difficulty levels of the tasks compared? We conducted two experiments in which participants chose the easier of two tasks, one that involved solving addition or multiplication problems (Experiment 1) or addition problems with different numbers of addends (Experiment 2) for varying amounts of time (in both experiments), and one that involved carrying a bucket of different weights over a fixed distance (in both experiments). We found that the probability of choosing to do the bucket task was higher when the bucket was empty than when it was weighted, and increased when the cognitive task was harder and its duration grew. We could account for the choice probabilities by mapping the independent variables onto one abstract variable, Φ. The functional identity of Φ remains to be determined. It could be interpreted as an inferred effort variable, subjective duration, or an abstract, amodal common code for difficulty.

Effort avoidance is not simply error avoidance.

Little is known about how effort is represented for different kinds of tasks. Recently, we suggested that it would help to establish empirical benchmarks for this problem. Accordingly, Feghhi and Rosenbaum (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45:983-994, 2019) estimated how many additional digits to be memorized corresponded to navigating through a narrow gap versus a wide gap. The estimates were based on a study in which participants chose between walking paths with associated memory demands. We found that participants were equally willing to choose to walk through a narrow gap as to walk through a wide gap when the narrow-gap walk required memorization of 0.55 fewer digits on average than the wide-gap walk. In the present experiment, we sought to replicate and extend this previous finding in two ways: (1) by presenting the memory digits in auditory rather than visual form to test the hypothesis that participants used phonological recoding of the visually presented digits; and (2) by providing a new metric of the relative difficulty of navigation errors compared to recall errors. We provided 36 university students with two action/memorization options per trial and asked them to choose the easier option. Each option had varying degrees of physical demand (walking through a wide or narrow gap) and mental demand (memorizing 6, 7, or 8 digits). We expected performance to be comparable to what we observed earlier with visually presented digits to be memorized, and this prediction was confirmed. We also used a new metric to show that navigation errors were implicitly judged to be 17% more costly than recall errors. The fact that this percentage was not 0 indicates that reducing percent error was not the only basis for reducing effort.

Determining the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of mental and physical tasks.

How do people determine the relative difficulty of mental tasks and physical tasks, and how do they determine the preferred order of such tasks? Is it harder to make such decisions if 1 task is mainly mental and the other is mainly physical than if both tasks are the same kind? To address these questions, we conducted 3 experiments. In experiment 1 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of mental tasks (math problems). In experiment 2 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of physical tasks (moving a bucket back and forth). In experiment 3 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of the same mental and physical tasks as in the first 2 experiments but with 1 of the tasks being mental and the other being physical. We reasoned that if mental task difficulty and physical task difficulty share a common code and if task ordering is systematically related to task difficulty, then judgments in experiment 3 should be as systematic as judgments in Experiments 1 and 2. The results confirmed the prediction and helped extend the notion of common codes for perception and performance to the evaluation of task difficulty and task ordering. A surprising finding was that mental difficulty was implicitly judged to be more important than physical difficulty for the tasks and population studied here. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Think then act, or act then think? Double-response reaction times shed light on decision dynamics in precrastination.

People often try to complete tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort-a phenomenon called precrastination (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Because precrastination is so widespread-as in answering emails too quickly, submitting papers before they have been polished, or, on larger scales, convicting people in the rush to judgment, or even going to war in the rush for revenge-it is important to understand its basis. Building on previous work on this phenomenon, we focused on two plausible accounts of it. According to the behavioral account, there is a desire to act for the sake of acting itself. According to the cognitive account, there is a desire to shorten one's mental to-do list so cognitive resources can be directed to other things. We invented a new task to distinguish between these hypotheses. Our participants made yes-no decisions under the requirement that they always respond twice per trial. We found that participants took longer for the first choice than the second and rarely changed their minds, even when second response accuracy was emphasized. This outcome went against the behavioral account, which predicted shorter first-response times than second-response times and lower (near chance) first-response accuracies than second-response accuracies. Instead, the data clearly showed that participants did all or most of their decision-making up front. The double-response reaction time task provides a new tool for studying decision dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Towards a common code for difficulty: Navigating a narrow gap is like memorizing an extra digit.

What makes a task hard or easy? The question seems easy, but answering it has been hard. The only consensus has been that, all else being equal, easy tasks can be performed by more individuals than hard tasks, and easy tasks are usually preferred over hard tasks. Feghhi and Rosenbaum (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45, 983-994, 2019) asked whether task difficulty might reflect a single amodal quantity. Based on their subjects' two-alternative forced-choice data from tasks involving choices of tasks with graded physical and mental challenges, the authors showed that the difficulty of passing through a narrow gap rather than a wide gap was psychologically equivalent to memorizing an extra .55 digits. In the present study, we extended this approach by adding new arguments for the hypothesis that task difficulty might reflect a single amodal quantity (inspired by considerations of physics, economics, and the common code hypothesis for the study of perception and action), and we tested narrower gaps than before to see whether we would find a larger equivalent memory-digit. Consistent with our prediction, we obtained a value of .95. We suggest that our multi-modal two-alternative forced-choice procedure can pave the way toward a better understanding of task difficulty.

Judging the subjective difficulty of different kinds of tasks.

People judge the relative difficulty of different kinds of tasks all the time, yet little is known about how they do so. We asked university students to choose between tasks that taxed perceptual-motor control and memorization to different degrees. Our participants decided whether to carry a box through a wide (81 cm) or narrow (36 cm) gap after memorizing six, seven, or eight digits. The model that maximized the likelihood of observing the choice data treated the extra physical demand of passing through the narrow gap as functionally equivalent to memorizing an extra .55 digits. Substantively, the model suggested that participants judged the difficulty of the compound tasks in terms of separate resources. The approach introduced here may help interrelate different kinds of task difficulty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The time for action is at hand.

The science of mental life and behavior has paid scant attention to the means by which mental life is translated into physical behavior. Why this is so was the topic of a 2005 American Psychologist article whose main title was "The Cinderella of Psychology." In the present article, we briefly review some of the reasons why motor control was relegated to the sidelines of psychology. Then we point to work showing that experimental psychologists have much to contribute to research on action generation. We focus on studies showing that actions are generated in a way that, at least by default, minimize changes between successive actions. The method is computationally as well as physically economical but also requires consideration of costs, including costs of different kinds. How such costs are compared is discussed in the next section. The final section offers comments about the future of psychologically focused action research. Two additional themes of the review concern methods for studying action generation. First, much can be learned through naturalistic observation. Second, subsequent experiments, designed to check naturalistic observations, can use very simple equipment and procedures. This can make the study of action generation easy to pursue in the psychology laboratory.