Decision Making and the Avoidance of Cognitive Demand

By Wouter Kool, Joseph T. McGuire, Zev B. Rosen, Matthew Botvinick. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2010

1,011 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Behavioral and economic theories have long maintained that actions are chosen so as to minimize demands for exertion or work, a principle sometimes referred to as the “law of less work.” The data supporting this idea pertain almost entirely to demands for physical effort. However, the same minimization principle has often been assumed also to apply to cognitive demand. We set out to evaluate the validity of this assumption. In six behavioral experiments, participants chose freely between courses of action associated with different levels of demand for controlled information processing. Together, the results of these experiments revealed a bias in favor of the less demanding course of action. The bias was obtained across a range of choice settings and demand manipulations, and was not wholly attributable to strategic avoidance of errors, minimization of time on task, or maximization of the rate of goal achievement. Remarkably, the effect also did not depend on awareness of the demand manipulation. Consistent with a motivational account, avoidance of demand displayed sensitivity to task incentives and co-varied with individual differences in the efficacy of executive control. The findings reported, together with convergent neuroscientific evidence, lend support to the idea that anticipated cognitive demand plays a significant role in behavioral decision-making.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b4f9f27720d1c7deeb41cea4a80cde8fac3f910

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

Proxy tasks and subjective measures can be misleading in evaluating explainable AI systems (2020, background): “However, people are reluctant to exert cognitive effort [24, 25] unless they are motivated or forced to do so.”
Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation (2016, background): “The flexibility of deliberation, however, comes at a cost (30, 31).”
The expected value of control: An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function (2013, positive): “Recent empirical work bears out this assumption, linking effort specifically to the exertion of cognitive control (Kool andBotvinick, 2012; Kool et al., 2010).”
Cognitive Offloading. (2016, background): “There has been much recent work on the tendency of individuals to avoid this type of effort [87,88].”
Motivation and cognitive control: from behavior to neural mechanism. (2015, background): “Across a number of task variations, Kool et al. (2010) observed a consistent preference for the lower-demand source (see also Schouppe et al. 2014).”
The necessity of rostrolateral prefrontal cortex for higher-level sequential behavior (2015, neutral): “Third, work on mental effort and costs of cognitive control have indicated that participants avoid initiating a run of trials they know will involve a higher taskswitching frequency (Kool et al., 2010), presumably because these runs will be more costly on the control system.”
An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (2013, neutral): “2010) used a paradigm in which subjects had to switch between two tasks, judging the magnitude or parity (odd/even) of single digits.”
The Computational and Neural Basis of Cognitive Control: Charted Territory and New Frontiers (2014, background): “” If, as we have recently proposed, control is costly (see Botvinick, 2007a, b; Kool et al., 2010; McGuire & Botvinick, 2010), then it makes sense to automatize the task that occurs most frequently, as this minimizes the frequency with which control will be demanded.”