Context effects in cognitive effort evaluation.

When given a choice, people will avoid cognitively effortful courses of action because the experience of effort is evaluated as aversive and costly. At the same time, a body of work spanning psychology, economics, and neuroscience suggests that goods, actions, and experiences are often evaluated in the context in which they are encountered, rather in absolute terms. To probe the extent to which the evaluation of cognitive effort is also context-dependent, we had participants learn associations between unique stimuli and subjective demand levels across low-demand and high-demand contexts. We probed demand preferences and subjective evaluation using a forced-choice paradigm as well by examining effort ratings, taken both on-line (during learning) and off-line (after choice). When choosing between two stimuli objectively identical in terms of demand, participants showed a clear preference for the stimulus learned in the low- versus high-demand context and rated this stimulus as more subjectively effortful than the low-demand context in on-line but not off-line ratings, suggesting an assimilation effect. Finally, we observed that the extent to which individual participants who exhibited stronger assimilation effects in off-line demand ratings were more likely to manifest an assimilation effect in demand preferences. Broadly, our findings suggest that effort evaluations occur in a context-dependent manner and are specifically assimilated to the broader context in which they occur.

Markers of too little effort or too much alertness during neuropsychological assessment: Demonstration with perioperative changes.

OBJECTIVE: Cognitive assessment is based on performance in different tests. However, this performance might be hindered by lack of effective effort on the one hand, and by too much stress on the other hand. Despite their known impact, there are currently no effective tools for measuring cognitive effort or stress effect during cognitive assessment. We developed real-time electrophysiological markers for cognitive effort and for stress effect, which could be used during cognitive assessment. METHODS: We assessed these markers during the use of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) before and after cardiac surgery, which is known to involve cognitive decline in up to 30%-50% of elderly patients. RESULTS: The major findings of the study, for the largest group of patients, with preoperative MoCA in the intermediate range, were that the decline is significantly associated (1) with higher preoperative cognitive effort and (2) with higher postoperative stress effect during the test. CONCLUSIONS: These findings, as well as preliminary additional ones, suggest a potential importance for monitoring cognitive effort and stress effect during assessment in general, and specifically during perioperative assessment. SIGNIFICANCE: Easy-to-use markers could improve the efficacy of cognitive assessment and direct treatment generally, and specifically for perioperative decline.

Investigating an effort avoidance account of attentional strategy choice.

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people's visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Measuring cognitive effort using tabular transformer-based language models of electronic health record-based audit log action sequences.

OBJECTIVES: To develop and validate a novel measure, action entropy, for assessing the cognitive effort associated with electronic health record (EHR)-based work activities. MATERIALS AND METHODS: EHR-based audit logs of attending physicians and advanced practice providers (APPs) from four surgical intensive care units in 2019 were included. Neural language models (LMs) were trained and validated separately for attendings' and APPs' action sequences. Action entropy was calculated as the cross-entropy associated with the predicted probability of the next action, based on prior actions. To validate the measure, a matched pairs study was conducted to assess the difference in action entropy during known high cognitive effort scenarios, namely, attention switching between patients and to or from the EHR inbox. RESULTS: Sixty-five clinicians performing 5 904 429 EHR-based audit log actions on 8956 unique patients were included. All attention switching scenarios were associated with a higher action entropy compared to non-switching scenarios (P < .001), except for the from-inbox switching scenario among APPs. The highest difference among attendings was for the from-inbox attention switching: Action entropy was 1.288 (95% CI, 1.256-1.320) standard deviations (SDs) higher for switching compared to non-switching scenarios. For APPs, the highest difference was for the to-inbox switching, where action entropy was 2.354 (95% CI, 2.311-2.397) SDs higher for switching compared to non-switching scenarios. DISCUSSION: We developed a LM-based metric, action entropy, for assessing cognitive burden associated with EHR-based actions. The metric showed discriminant validity and statistical significance when evaluated against known situations of high cognitive effort (ie, attention switching). With additional validation, this metric can potentially be used as a screening tool for assessing behavioral action phenotypes that are associated with higher cognitive burden. CONCLUSION: An LM-based action entropy metric-relying on sequences of EHR actions-offers opportunities for assessing cognitive effort in EHR-based workflows.

A short mindfulness induction might increase women's mental rotation performance.

The study aimed to investigate the effects of an embodied mindfulness treatment on chronometric mental rotation. Forty-four women and 47 men participated and were randomly divided into two groups: a mindfulness induction group and a control group. They completed two sets of 150 mental rotation tasks with cube figures each. Subjective cognitive effort (measured after each block), reaction time, and accuracy were analyzed using linear mixed models with the factors of time, mindfulness, angular disparity, and gender. The significant finding was a three-way interaction between pre-post testing, mindfulness, and gender for reaction times. This interaction suggests that women might benefit more from the mindfulness induction, while men may benefit more from the control condition. The analysis of subjective cognitive effort indicates that women and men perceive the same cognitive effort when solving cube-figure tasks.

Mind the instructions: Reward cues are liked first, wanted later.

Current theories propose that mental effort is invested only when the anticipated benefits, such as rewards, outweigh the associated costs, like task difficulty. Yet, it remains unclear whether this motivational and mitigating aspect of reward processing is reflected in the evaluation of reward/difficulty cues as such, and to what extent it depends on task experience. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 84), we used the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) to gauge affective evaluations of nonword cues predicting reward and task difficulty levels. Contrary to previous studies, the AMP was administered at the outset, after cue instructions, and after the cues were used in a random dot motion (RDM) task. Compared to baseline, cues predicting a larger reward were evaluated more positively after RDM task experience, and most importantly, already after cue instructions, with no difference between the two phases. This evaluative effect manifested in increased performance after larger reward cues in the RDM task. Our results suggest that AMP effects may generally capture performance expectations which are independent of task experience. Importantly, these instructed expectations of reward and difficulty play a crucial role in the evaluation and subsequent investment of mental effort.

The resolution of proactive interference in a novel visual working memory task: A behavioral and pupillometric study.

Proactive interference (PI) occurs when previously learned information impairs memory for more recently learned information. Most PI studies have employed verbal stimuli, while the role of PI in visual working memory (VWM) has had relatively little attention. In the verbal domain, Johansson and colleagues (2018) found that pupil diameter - a real-time neurophysiological index of cognitive effort - reflects the accumulation and resolution of PI. Here we use a novel, naturalistic paradigm to test the behavioral and pupillary correlates of PI resolution for what-was-where item-location bindings in VWM. Importantly, in our paradigm, trials (PI vs. no-PI condition) are mixed in a block, and participants are naïve to the condition until they are tested. This design sidesteps concerns about differences in encoding strategies or generalized effort differences between conditions. Across three experiments (N = 122 total) we assessed PI's effect on VWM and whether PI resolution during memory retrieval is associated with greater cognitive effort (as indexed by the phasic, task-evoked pupil response). We found strong support for PI's detrimental effect on VWM (even with our spatially distributed stimuli), but no consistent link between interference resolution and effort during memory retrieval (this, even though the pupil was a reliable indicator that higher-performing individuals tried harder during memory encoding). We speculate that when explicit strategies are minimized, and PI resolution relies primarily on implicit processing, the effect may not be sufficient to trigger a robust pupillometric response.

An examination of the motivation to manage distraction.

Individuals exhibit limited awareness of when their attention is captured by salient but irrelevant stimuli, and it has long been argued that involuntary attentional capture by such stimuli is minimally disruptive to information processing. Yet, robust mechanisms of distractor suppression are hypothesized to support the control of attention, which presumably serve in the interest of managing distraction. In the present study, I examine whether participants are aware of the cost of distraction with respect to task performance, and whether they are motivated to manage this cost even when it is effortful to do so. Across three experiments, participants were willing to exert physical effort in order to reduce the frequency with which they encountered physically salient distractors, and in a fourth experiment tended to prefer trials with fewer distractors when given a choice over distractor frequency. Importantly, the amount of physical effort exerted varied as a function of the degree to which task-irrelevant distractors impaired search performance, suggesting that people are sensitive to the cost of distraction.

Too hard, too easy, or just right? The effects of context on effort and boredom aversion.

Despite people's general desire to avoid cognitive effort, there is a limit to our parsimony: boredom, a state defined by a lack of successful mental engagement, is found to be similarly aversive. The work presented here investigates how context - the alternative tasks present and the environmental context - impacts people's aversion to exerting cognitive effort and avoiding boredom via a demand-selection task. In a population of undergraduate students, we assessed how people's willingness to exert mental effort (in a working memory task) is affected by the presence of an easier alternative (less cognitively demanding) or a boring alternative (doing nothing at all). To manipulate environmental context, we conducted the experiment online, where participants completed the task remotely, and in a controlled laboratory setting. We find people willingly seek out effortful tasks to avoid boredom, despite avoiding high demands when both tasks on offer required some effort. We also find large effects of the participants' environmental context, with preferences for the most demanding task increasing by over 150% in the lab compared to online. These results bear relevance to theories that argue the costs of effort are determined relative to the alternatives available (e.g., opportunity cost theories). Moreover, the results demonstrate that researchers who deliberately (or inadvertently) manipulate effort and boredom must consider the effects context (both choice and environmental) may have on people's behaviour.

Trying Harder: How Cognitive Effort Sculpts Neural Representations during Working Memory.

While the exertion of mental effort improves performance on cognitive tasks, the neural mechanisms by which motivational factors impact cognition remain unknown. Here, we used fMRI to test how changes in cognitive effort, induced by changes in task difficulty, impact neural representations of working memory (WM). Participants (both sexes) were precued whether WM difficulty would be hard or easy. We hypothesized that hard trials demanded more effort as a later decision required finer mnemonic precision. Behaviorally, pupil size was larger and response times were slower on hard compared with easy trials suggesting our manipulation of effort succeeded. Neurally, we observed robust persistent activity during delay periods in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), especially during hard trials. Yet, details of the memoranda could not be decoded from patterns in prefrontal activity. In the patterns of activity in the visual cortex, however, we found strong decoding of memorized targets, where accuracy was higher on hard trials. To potentially link these across-region effects, we hypothesized that effort, carried by persistent activity in the PFC, impacts the quality of WM representations encoded in the visual cortex. Indeed, we found that the amplitude of delay period activity in the frontal cortex predicted decoded accuracy in the visual cortex on a trial-wise basis. These results indicate that effort-related feedback signals sculpt population activity in the visual cortex, improving mnemonic fidelity.

The roles of intrinsic motivation and capability-related factors in cognitive effort-based decision-making.

Individual differences in cognitive effort-based decision-making can be used to reveal human motivations to invest effort into a given task. Preferences among options that differ by dimensions related to demand levels (i.e., the interaction of task characteristics and performance measures) are also heavily influenced by how likely a person can succeed at a given option. However, most existing cognitive effort-based research has focused primarily on demand-related factors, leading to confounding inferences about the motivation behind these choices. This study used an adaptive algorithm to adjust relative demand levels for three cognitive tasks to investigate general and individual differences in demand preferences. The results highlight an overall pattern of individual differences in intrinsic motivation to perform challenging tasks, supporting research that found cognitive effort aversive to some but attractive to others. These results suggest that relative demand levels and intrinsic task factors drive the motivation to select an action.

"Encephalapp Stroop": Validity and reliability of a smartphone app to measure cognitive performance in physically active subjects.

This study aimed to analyze the validity and reliability of a smartphone app (i.e., Encephalapp Stroop) to measure cognitive performance. Ten physically active individuals (mean age: 25.2 ± 4.3 years) participated in three laboratory visits. In a randomized sequence, subjects completed cognitive assessments using the app and a computer separately. The response times from 100 measurements for congruent and incongruent stimuli were compared between the two devices (app and computer) using the intraclass correlation coefficient, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r), Cronbach's alpha (α), and Bland-Altman plots. There was excellent agreement between the computerized Stroop and the app version for response times for congruent (ICC = 0.806, p < 0.001; Bland-Altman bias = 41.3 ± 56.4 ms, p < 0.001) and incongruent stimuli (ICC = 0.755, p < 0.001; Bland-Altman bias = 76.4 ± 75.1 ms, p < 0.001). In comparison to the computerized version, the app demonstrated a moderate correlation for response times of congruent (r = 0.678, p < 0.001) and incongruent (r = 0.623, p < 0.001) stimuli. The results of the present study indicate that the response times of congruent and incongruent stimuli can be easily, accurately, and reliably evaluated using a mobile app.

Action control costs in task selection: Agents avoid actions with incompatible movement and effect features.

When a movement triggers effects with incompatible features, conflict between action and effect features creates costs for action planning and initiation. We investigated whether such action control costs also factor into action choices in terms of the principle of least effort. Participants completed a reaction-time experiment, where they were instructed to perform left and right mouse swipes in response to directional cues presented on the screen. Participants could select between two action options on each trial: Depending on which part of the screen (upper or lower) the action was performed in, the swipe resulted in a visual stimulus moving in the same (compatible) or in the opposite (incompatible) direction as the mouse. Incompatible action-effect mappings did indeed incur action control costs. In accordance with effort avoidance, the proportion of compatible choices was significantly above chance level, suggesting that action selection and initiation costs factor into participants preferences. Interestingly, however, participants' choice tendencies were not predicted by the actual increase in action-initiation costs in the incompatible condition. This indicates that effort-related decisions are not simply based on monitoring performance in the actual task, but they are also influenced by preestablished notions of action-planning costs.

Filtering distractors is costly.

To find a target in visual search, it is often necessary to filter out task-irrelevant distractors. People find the process of distractor filtering effortful, exerting physical effort to reduce the number of distractors that need to be filtered on a given search trial. Working memory demands are sufficiently costly that people are sometimes willing to accept aversive heat stimulation in exchange for the ability to avoid performing a working memory task. The present study examines whether filtering distractors in visual search is similarly costly. The findings reveal that individuals are sometimes willing to accept an electric shock in exchange for the ability to skip a single trial of visual search, increasingly so as the demands of distractor filtering increase. This was true even when acceptance of shock resulted in no overall time savings, although acceptance of shock was overall infrequent and influenced by a plurality of factors, including boredom and curiosity. These findings have implications for our understanding of the mental burden of distractor filtering and why people seek to avoid cognitive effort more broadly.

A Review of the Use of Gaze and Pupil Metrics to Assess Mental Workload in Gamified and Simulated Sensorimotor Tasks.

Gaze and pupil metrics are used to represent higher cognitive processes in a variety of contexts. One growing area of research is the real-time assessment of workload and corresponding effort in gamified or simulated cognitive and motor tasks, which will be reviewed in this paper. While some measurements are consistent across studies, others vary and are likely dependent on the nature of the effort required by the task and the resulting changes in arousal. Pupil diameter is shown to consistently increase with task effort and arousal; however, the valence of arousal must be considered. In many cases, measures of pupil diameter were sensitive to both excessive and insufficient challenge. Overall, it is evident that gaze and pupil metrics are valuable to assess the cognitive state during gamified and simulated tasks, and further research is indicated regarding their use in clinical populations in rehabilitation to inform optimally engaging interventions.

What Is Mental Effort: A Clinical Perspective.

Although mental effort is a frequently used term, it is poorly defined and understood. Consequently, its usage is frequently loose and potentially misleading. In neuroscience research, the term is used to mean both the cognitive work that is done to meet task demands and the subjective experience of performing that work. We argue that conflating these two meanings hampers progress in understanding cognitive impairments in neuropsychiatric conditions because cognitive work and the subjective experience of it have distinct underlying mechanisms. We suggest that the most coherent and clinically useful perspective on mental effort is that it is a subjective experience. This makes a clear distinction between cognitive impairments that arise from changes in the cognitive apparatus, as in dementia and brain injury, and those that arise from subjective difficulties in carrying out the cognitive work, as in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, and other motivational disorders. We review recent advances in neuroscience research that suggests that the experience of effort has emerged to control task switches so as to minimize costs relative to benefits. We consider how these advances can contribute to our understanding of the experience of increased effort perception in clinical populations. This more specific framing of mental effort will offer a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of cognitive impairments in differing clinical groups and will ultimately facilitate better therapeutic interventions.

Insight into differing decision-making strategies that underlie cognitively effort-based decision making using computational modeling in rats.

RATIONALE: The rat cognitive effort task (rCET), a rodent model of cognitive rather than physical effort, requires animals to choose between an easy or hard visuospatial discrimination, with a correct hard choice more highly rewarded. Like in humans, there is stable individual variation in choice behavior. In previous reports, animals were divided into two groups-workers and slackers-based on their mean preference for the harder option. Although these groups differed in their response to pharmacological challenges, the rationale for using this criterion for grouping was not robust. METHODS: We collated experimental data from multiple cohorts of male and female rats performing the rCET and used a model-based framework combining drift diffusion modeling with cluster analysis to identify the decision-making processes underlying variation in choice behavior. RESULTS: We verified that workers and slackers are statistically different groups but also found distinct intra-group profiles. These subgroups exhibited dissociable performance during the attentional phase, linked to distinct decision-making profiles during choice. Reanalysis of previous pharmacology data using this model-based framework showed that serotonergic drug effects were explained by changes in decision boundaries and non-decision times, while scopolamine's effects were driven by changes in decision starting points and rates of evidence accumulation. CONCLUSIONS: Modeling revealed the decision-making processes that are associated with cognitive effort costs, and how these differ across individuals. Reanalysis of drug data provided insight into the mechanisms through which different neurotransmitter systems impact cognitively effortful attention and decision-making processes, with relevance to multiple psychiatric disorders.

Expertise differences in cognitive interpreting: A meta-analysis of eye tracking studies across four decades.

This meta-analytic research delves into the influence of expertise on cognitive interpreting, emphasizing time efficiency, accuracy, and cognitive effort, in alignment with prevailing expertise theories that link professional development and cognitive efficiency. The study assimilates empirical data from 18 eye-tracking studies conducted over the past four decades, encompassing a sample of 1581 interpreters. The objective is to elucidate the role of expertise in interpretative performance while tracing the evolution of these dynamics over time. Findings suggest that expert interpreters outperform novices in time efficiency and accuracy and exhibit lower cognitive effort, especially in sight and consecutive interpreting. This effect is particularly pronounced in the English-Chinese language pair and with the use of E-prime and Tobii eye-tracking systems. Further, fixation count and pupil size are essential metrics impacting cognitive effort. These findings have vital implications for interpreter training programs, suggesting a focus on expertise development to enhance efficiency and accuracy, reduce cognitive load, and emphasize the importance of sight interpreting as a foundational skill. The selection of technology and understanding of specific ocular metrics also emerged as essential for future research and practical applications in the interpreting industry. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Linguistics > Cognitive.

Some scales require cognitive effort: A systematic review on the role of working memory in scalar implicature derivation.

If some inferences require cognitive effort, could that mean, that all of them do? The scalar term "some" has long fascinated academics from various backgrounds, as it can be interpreted either purely semantically, as "some and possibly all", or pragmatically, as "some and not all". The pragmatic reading implies the generation of what is called a scalar implicature. While scientific investigation of such implicatures has given rise to many potential explanations of the "pragmatic enrichment" phenomenon behind them, the debate between the two dominant frameworks-the literal-first and the default accounts-has not convincingly been settled. With the birth of a new interdisciplinary field, appropriately dubbed experimental pragmatics, the last 20 years have led to a substantial amount of new empirical data on scalar implicatures. In this ongoing investigation, the loading and measuring of Working Memory has become an important experimentation tool, as it allows to test the contrasting hypotheses with regard to the cognitive effort of implicature generation, which are made by the two main theoretical accounts. The current systematic review evaluates the relevant literature until March 08, 2022 in an attempt to shed light on the role of Working Memory in implicature derivation. A comprehensive search, and two-step review procedure yielded a sample of 18 studies, containing data of 23 relevant experiments. Findings were bundled in a narrative synthesis and combined through two separate meta-analyses. Our results support the literal-first account, by showing that the derivation of scalar implicatures is a cognitively effortful process that is sensitive to changes in the available Working Memory resources. However, as the reported effects are relatively weak and capricious, we argue that the development of more sophisticated paradigms and eventually, stronger theories within the field, will be crucial in order to both fully understand the current results and set-up fruitful future research.

Trying harder: how cognitive effort sculpts neural representations during working memory.

The neural mechanisms by which motivational factors influence cognition remain unknown. Using fMRI, we tested how cognitive effort impacts working memory (WM). Participants were precued whether WM difficulty would be hard or easy. Hard trials demanded more effort as a later decision required finer mnemonic precision. Behaviorally, pupil size was larger and response times were slower on hard trials suggesting our manipulation of effort succeeded. Neurally, we observed robust persistent activity in prefrontal cortex, especially during hard trials. We found strong decoding of location in visual cortex, where accuracy was higher on hard trials. Connecting these across-region effects, we found that the amplitude of delay period activity in frontal cortex predicted decoded accuracy in visual cortex on a trial-wise basis. We conclude that the gain of persistent activity in frontal cortex may be the source of effort-related feedback signals that improve the quality of WM representations stored in visual cortex.