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Anticipating cognitive effort: roles of perceived error-likelihood and time demands

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Abstract

Why are some actions evaluated as effortful? In the present set of experiments we address this question by examining individuals’ perception of effort when faced with a trade-off between two putative cognitive costs: how much time a task takes vs. how error-prone it is. Specifically, we were interested in whether individuals anticipate engaging in a small amount of hard work (i.e., low time requirement, but high error-likelihood) vs. a large amount of easy work (i.e., high time requirement, but low error-likelihood) as being more effortful. In between-subject designs, Experiments 1 through 3 demonstrated that individuals anticipate options that are high in perceived error-likelihood (yet less time consuming) as more effortful than options that are perceived to be more time consuming (yet low in error-likelihood). Further, when asked to evaluate which of the two tasks was (a) more effortful, (b) more error-prone, and (c) more time consuming, effort-based and error-based choices closely tracked one another, but this was not the case for time-based choices. Utilizing a within-subject design, Experiment 4 demonstrated overall similar pattern of judgments as Experiments 1 through 3. However, both judgments of error-likelihood and time demand similarly predicted effort judgments. Results are discussed within the context of extant accounts of cognitive control, with considerations of how error-likelihood and time demands may independently and conjunctively factor into judgments of cognitive effort.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, 995 Regent Dr. Koelbel Building 419 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Timothy L. Dunn

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Michael Inzlicht

  3. Rotman School of Management, Toronto, Canada

    Michael Inzlicht

  4. Department of Psychology, Universiy of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Evan F. Risko

Authors
  1. Timothy L. Dunn
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  2. Michael Inzlicht
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  3. Evan F. Risko
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Correspondence to Timothy L. Dunn.

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Funding

This work was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and funding from the Canada Research Chairs program to Evan F. Risko.

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest pertaining to the development or submission of this manuscript.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in these studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards, and were approved by the University of Waterloo Office of Research Ethics.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

All data and corresponding code are freely available via the Open Science Framework at http://osf.io/2szy3.

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Dunn, T.L., Inzlicht, M. & Risko, E.F. Anticipating cognitive effort: roles of perceived error-likelihood and time demands. Psychological Research 83, 1033–1056 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0943-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0943-x

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