What Is the Subjective Cost of Cognitive Effort? Load, Trait, and Aging Effects Revealed by Economic Preference

It has long been assumed that people treat cognitive effort as costly, but also that such effort costs may vary greatly across individuals. Individual differences in subjective effort could present a major and pervasive confound in behavioral and neuroscience assessments, by conflating cognitive ability with cognitive motivation. Self-report cognitive effort scales have been developed, but objective measures are lacking. In this study, we use the behavioral economic approach of revealed preferences to quantify subjective effort. Specifically, we adapted a well-established discounting paradigm to measure the extent to which cognitive effort causes participants to discount monetary rewards. The resulting metrics…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• MC
  McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience