Toward a Rational and Mechanistic Account of Mental Effort.

By Amitai Shenhav, Sebastian Musslick, Falk Lieder, Wouter Kool, T. Griffiths, J. Cohen, Matthew Botvinick. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2017

875 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9df8a4f8966500f05a614e7cf889a6b368ec8196

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Citations in the corpus

Real consequences matter: Why hypothetical biases in the valuation of time persist even in controlled lab experiments (2019, background): “A possible explanation for these differences is that individuals try to minimize cognitive effort exerted on tasks (e.g. Walton et al., 2006; Kool et al., 2010; Shenhav et al., 2017), since cognitive effort is costly and has an opportunity cost (Kurzban et al., 2013; Westbrook and Braver, 2015).”
High Boredom Proneness and Low Trait Self-Control Impair Adherence to Social Distancing Guidelines during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Critically, applying self-control is experienced as effortful and aversive [17], and functional models of self-control propose that this sensation of effort signals the costs of control [18,19].”
Doing more with less: meta-reasoning and meta-learning in humans and machines (2019, result): “The computation of the VOC at the heart of rational meta-reasoning also has close parallels with ideas that have been proposed in the neuroscience literature on cognitive control [31 ,32].”
Explanations Can Reduce Overreliance on AI Systems During Decision-Making (2022, methodology): “This economic framing of cognitive effort allocation is supported by evidence from behavioral experiments [45, 48, 94], neuroscientific studies [7, 68, 81], and computer simulations [39, 75].”
Inductive biases for deep learning of higher-level cognition (2020, background): “This observation suggests that system 2 cognition is crucial in order to achieve the kind of flexibility and robustness to changes in distribution required in the natural world (Shenhav et al., 2017; Kool and Botvinick, 2018).”
The Self-Regulation-View in Writing-to-Learn: Using Journal Writing to Optimize Cognitive Load in Self-Regulated Learning (2020, background): “…suggest that learners spontaneously tend to keep their invested mental effort at a minimum during journal writing (see also Feldon et al. 2019; Shenhav et al. 2017) and thus do not sufficiently engage in germane processes of self-regulated learning such as elaboration, organization,…”
Pupil dilation as an index of effort in cognitive control tasks: A review (2018, background): “These neural circuits thus support the amount of effort or control invested in a task, and the underlying processes are likely better captured by a decision process rather than by a capacity or resource that is physically limited (Kurzban et al., 2013; Shenhav et al., 2017).”
Efficiency of learning vs. processing: Towards a normative theory of multitasking (2020, background): “For example, it is easy to include an explicit cost of cognitive control (e.g., Shenhav, Botvinick, & Cohen, 2013; Shenhav et al., 2017; Manohar et al., 2015) by adding a term to the basis set reward function that implements a cost that increases with the number of tasks executed, or the use of a…”
The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued (2018, background): “However, as we build toward a rational and mechanistic account of effort [19], it is important to consider the abundant findings indicating that effort is intrinsically valued and that it boosts valuation.”
Theta-Phase Connectivity between Medial Prefrontal and Posterior Areas Underlies Novel Instructions Implementation (2022, background): “…this literature, mPFC has been attributed a central role in determining and instantiating control policies in several computational models of proactive and reactive cognitive control (Dosenbach et al., 2008; Botvinick and Cohen, 2014; Shenhav et al., 2017; Verguts, 2017; Holroyd and Verguts, 2021).”
Frontal effective connectivity increases with task demands and time on task: a Dynamic Causal Model of electrocorticogram in macaque monkeys (2022, background): “Engaging in a cognitive task is costly [1, 2, 3].”