The DOI matches its Crossref record; 54 of the 54 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What Is the Subjective Cost of Cognitive Effort? Load, Trait, and Aging Effects Revealed by Economic Preference
Open accessAbstract
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 are sensitive to both within-individual factors, including objective load and reward amount, and between-individual factors, including age and trait cognitive engagement. We further validate cognitive effort discounting by benchmarking it against well-established measures of delay discounting. The results highlight the promise and utility of behavioral economic tools for assessing trait and state influences on cognitive motivation.
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Toward a rational and mechanistic account of mental effort
Shenhav, A., Musslick, S., Lieder, F., Kool, W., Griffiths, T. L., Cohen, J. D., & Botvinick, M. M. (2017) · Annual Review of Neuroscience · doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-072116-031526 · Cited by 1,077
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Botvinick, M., & Braver, T. (2015) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015044 · Cited by 909
Self-citationIntegrating Models of Self-Regulation
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Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs.
Cameron, C. D., Hutcherson, C. A., Ferguson, A. M., Scheffer, J. A., Hadjiandreou, E., & Inzlicht, M. (2019) · Journal of Experimental Psychology: General · doi:10.1037/xge0000595 · Cited by 363
Metadata
- Authors
- Westbrook, A., Kester, D., & Braver, T. S.
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2013-07-22
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- e68210
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2146112275
- Cited by
- 533
- References
- 54
- FWCI
- 12.05
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
