Wagers for work: Decomposing the costs of cognitive effort

Some aspects of cognition are more taxing than others. Accordingly, many people will avoid cognitively demanding tasks in favor of simpler alternatives. Which components of these tasks are costly, and how much, remains unknown. Here, we use a novel task design in which subjects request wages for com...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPLoS computational biology Vol. 20; no. 4; p. e1012060
Main Authors Master, Sarah L., Curtis, Clayton E., Dayan, Peter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 29.04.2024
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Accuracy
Behavior
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive tasks
Costs
Decomposition
Experiments
Fractals
Memory
Physical Sciences
Psychological research
Ratings & rankings
Social Sciences
Wages & salaries
United States
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Summary:Some aspects of cognition are more taxing than others. Accordingly, many people will avoid cognitively demanding tasks in favor of simpler alternatives. Which components of these tasks are costly, and how much, remains unknown. Here, we use a novel task design in which subjects request wages for completing cognitive tasks and a computational modeling procedure that decomposes their wages into the costs driving them. Using working memory as a test case, our approach revealed that gating new information into memory and protecting against interference are costly. Critically, other factors, like memory load, appeared less costly. Other key factors which may drive effort costs, such as error avoidance, had minimal influence on wage requests. Our approach is sensitive to individual differences, and could be used in psychiatric populations to understand the true underlying nature of apparent cognitive deficits.
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The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:1553-7358
1553-734X
1553-7358
DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012060