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Mental Effort

Mental effort refers to the intensity of a person's engagement with a cognitive task. High-effort situations are associated with high load on attention and executive control mechanisms, as distinct from situations in which cognitive processing is more automatic. Committing more effort can improve task performance. Applying effort to a focal task may also detract from performance on secondary tasks. Effort can be associated with a subjective sense of difficulty, strain, or work. Effort also tends to be accompanied by bodily arousal and is sometimes measured via increases in heart rate, pupil diameter, blood pressure, or galvanic skin response.

For most of its history, mental effort has remained an elusive and slippery construct, but the application of modern neuroscientific methods coupled with the development of formal theory promises to lend it greater rigor.

This entry describes the role of mental effort in theories of cognitive function, addresses how people strategically decide whether and how to devote effort to tasks, discusses how people use their experience of mental effort to make other inferences, and reviews relevant findings in neuroscience.

Mental Effort and its Place in Theories of Cognition

Cognitive Resources and Capacity Mobilization

Traditional, resource-based models regard cognitive performance as dependent on a limited supply of cognitive resources, energy, or channel capacity. Within this framework, devoting more effort to a task involves allocating more general-purpose resources to it. For tasks that are more difficult, successful performance draws more resources away from other ongoing activities. Thus, the amount of effort devoted to a focal task can be measured by the performance decrement on secondary tasks.

In an early, influential treatment of the subject, Daniel Kahneman suggested that mental effort might involve not only resource reallocation but also modulation of the attentional system's total capacity. On this view, mental effort—and the associated physiological arousal—reflects the transient expansion of an elastic pool of available resources. Viewing effort as capacity recruitment can explain why markers of physiological arousal respond both to cognitive demands and to incentives.

Effects of Effort on Performance

Increased effort can improve performance on a variety of target-detection, memory, problem solving, and decision tasks. This can be demonstrated by showing that performance varies together with task-related incentives. For instance, individuals dividing their attention between simultaneous tasks tend to perform better on the task with the greater incentive.

Some tasks are relatively insensitive to changes in effort (e.g., easy tasks can often be performed well with little commitment of effort). In other cases, effort can even be detrimental. If a task involves well-practiced, automatic physical skills (e.g., golf putting), arousal and focused attention can cause “choking.” Effort can impair types of problem solving that depend on associative processing or sudden insight. Additional effort can also be harmful if physiological arousal is already high (e.g., in a test-taking environment), a principle known as the Yerkes-Dodson law.

Self-Regulatory Depletion

Although resource-based frameworks have traditionally emphasized competition among concurrent activities, exertion of mental effort can also impair later performance. Roy Baumeister and colleagues have proposed that the mental resources underlying self-regulation not only are limited but also can be temporarily depleted. For example, if someone initially performs a task in which he or she must override impulses, that person might show reduced self-control or perseverance in a subsequent activity. Such findings have been used to support a “muscle” metaphor, wherein the ability to exert effortful self-control is subject to short-run fatigue.

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