Abstract
How do we compare the difficulty of different kinds of tasks, and how we do sequence tasks of different kinds when the basis for the ordering is the tasks’ difficulty levels? The ability to do these things requires a common currency, but the identity of that currency, if it exists, is unknown. We hypothesized that people may believe that the time that attention is paid to tasks enables people to compare and sequence tasks of different kinds. To evaluate this hypothesis, we tested three groups of participants. One group estimated the proportion of time that performance of a task requires attention—what we called attention time proportions or ATPs. We obtained ATPs for tasks that were “more intellectual” (counting) and others that were “more physical” (locomotion). Two additional groups made 2-alternative-forced-choice decisions about the relative ease and preferred sequencing of all possible pairs of tasks for which ATPs were independently obtained. We found that ATPs predicted judgments of task difficulty and preferred task order.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and material
The data and materials for this manuscript are available upon request.
Notes
Our choice of the acronym ATP is meant to signal our respect for the value of seeking a physical basis for subjective effort. Adenosine triphosphate (the more familiar “ATP”) is often called the molecular unit of currency for intracellular energy transfer (Knowles, 1980).
References
Baddeley, A. (2012). Working memory: Theories, models, and controversies. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 1–29.
Beaty, R., Frieler, K., Norgaard, M., Merseal, H., MacDonald, M., & Weiss, D. (2020). Spontaneous melodic productions of expert musicians contain sequencing biases seen in language production. psyarxiv.com.
Behaghel, O. (1909). Beziehungen zwischen umfang und reihenfolge von satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen, 25, 110.
Botvinick, M. M., Braver, T. S., Barch, D. M., Carter, C. S., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological Review, 108, 624.
Chen, H., & Wyble, B. (2016). Attribute amnesia reflects a lack of memory consolidation for attended information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 225.
Dreisbach, G., & Fischer, R. (2012). Conflicts as aversive signals. Brain and Cognition, 78, 94–98.
Dunn, T. L., Lutes, D. J., & Risko, E. F. (2016). Metacognitive evaluation in the avoidance of demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 1372.
Feghhi, I., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2019). Judging the subjective difficulty of different kinds of tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45, 983–994. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000653.
Feghhi, I., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2020). Effort-avoidance isn’t simply error-avoidance. Psychological Research PsychologischeForschung. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01331-2 (Epub ahead of print).
Fitts, P. M., & Posner, M. I. (1967). Human performance. Belmont: Brooks Cole.
Gailliot, M. T., & Baumeister, R. F. (2007). The physiology of willpower: Linking blood glucose to self-control. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 303–327.
Gray, W. D., Sims, C. R., Fu, W. T., & Schoelles, M. J. (2006). The soft constraints hypothesis: A rational analysis approach to resource allocation for interactive behavior. Psychological Review, 113, 461.
Grondin, S. (Ed.). (2008). Psychology of time. Emerald: Bingley.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
Hopstaken, J. F., van der Linden, D., Bakker, A. B., Kompier, M. A., & Leung, Y. K. (2016). Shifts in attention during mental fatigue: Evidence from subjective, behavioral, physiological, and eye-tracking data. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 878–889.
Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Knowles, J. R. (1980). Enzyme-catalyzed phosphoryl transfer reactions. Annual Review of Biochemistry, 49, 877–919.
Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 665.
Kurzban, R., Duckworth, A., Kable, J. W., & Myers, J. (2013). An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 661–726.
Lurquin, J. H., & Miyake, A. (2017). Challenges to ego-depletion research go beyond the replication crisis: A need for tackling the conceptual crisis. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 568.
MacDonald, M. C. (2013). How language production shapes language form and comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 226. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00226.
Metcalfe, J., & Greene, M. J. (2007). Metacognition of agency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 184.
Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 297–326.
Morsella, E., Wilson, L. E., Berger, C. C., Honhongva, M., Gazzaley, A., & Bargh, J. A. (2009). Subjective aspects of cognitive control at different stages of processing. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 1807–1824.
Peterson, L. R., & Peterson, M. J. (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 193–198.
Potts, C. A., Pastel, S., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2018). How are cognitive and physical difficulty compared? Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80, 500–511.
Rosenbaum, D. A., & Bui, B. (2019). Does task sustainability provide a unified measure of subjective task difficulty? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1980–1987. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01631-8.
Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological review, 84(2), 127.
Sidarus, N., & Haggard, P. (2016). Difficult action decisions reduce the sense of agency: A study using the Eriksen flanker task. Acta Psychologica, 166, 1–11.
Spelke, E., Hirst, W., & Neisser, U. (1976). Skills of divided attention. Cognition, 4, 215–230.
Tice, D. M., Baumeister, R. F., Shmueli, D., & Muraven, M. (2007). Restoring the self: Positive affect helps improve self-regulation following ego depletion. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 379–384.
Warm, J. S., Parasuraman, R., & Matthews, G. (2008). Vigilance requires hard mental work and is stressful. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 50, 433–441.
Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. (1996). The role of attention in time estimation processes. In Advances in Psychology (vol. 115, pp. 143–164). North-Holland.
Funding
There are no sources of funding to report for this research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
We thank YB, JJ, MM, CP, KS, and MV for help with data collection and analysis, RC, IF, and KG for helpful discussions, and BH, TL, and an anonymous reviewer for very useful comments on the first write-up. Correspondence should be directed to the first author.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Code availability
The code for this study is available upon request.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Potts, C.A., Rosenbaum, D.A. Does attention solve the “apples-and-oranges” problems of judging task difficulty and task order?. Psychological Research 85, 3040–3047 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01453-7