Cognitive Effort and Decision-making: Integrating Computational, Behavioral, And Psychophysiological Approaches
Our ability to perform tasks is constrained by our limited mental resources, which mandates that people should minimize use of cognitively “effortful” processing when possible. Recent theories posit that decisions to expend effort are governed by a cost-benefit tradeoff, whereby the potential benefits of effort can offset its perceived costs. I will present a series of recent, computationally-informed experiments combining behavioural experimentation and pupillometry to gain critical insights into understanding when and why we allocate—or withhold—cognitive effort, both from an individual differences perspective, and at the level of the task by examining the effect of changes in costs and benefits. We find that individual differences in cognitive capacity—and relatedly, intrinsic motivation—govern trial-to-trial adjustments to cognitive effort expenditure in accordance with shifts in costs (i.e., opportunity costs) and benefits (i.e., rewards). Further, we find that task-evoked pupillary responses can elucidate internal computations of these effort allocation decisions.