A labor/leisure tradeoff in cognitive control.

Abstract

Daily life frequently offers a choice between activities that are profitable but mentally demanding (cognitive labor) and activities that are undemanding but also unproductive (cognitive leisure). Although such decisions are often implicit, they help determine academic performance, career trajectories, and even health outcomes. Previous research has shed light both on the executive control functions that ultimately define cognitive labor and a 'default mode' of brain function that accompanies cognitive leisure. However, little is known about how labor/leisure decisions are actually made. Here, we identify a central principle guiding such decisions. Results from three economic-choice experiments indicate that the motivation underlying cognitive labor/leisure decision-making is to strike an optimal balance between income and leisure, as given by a joint utility function. The results reported establish a new connection between microeconomics and research on executive function. They also suggest a new interpretation of so-called ego-depletion effects, and a potential new approach to such phenomena as mind-wandering and self-control failure.Imagine a high-school student sitting at her home computer on a school night. Moment by moment, she faces a recurring decision: Should I focus on my calculus homework, or should I take a break to daydream or watch online videos? The student's decision is essentially one between cognitive labor and cognitive leisure, mental work and mental rest. In the language of cognitive psychology, the labor in question involves the effortful engagement of executive control: a set of functions, dependent on the prefrontal cortex, that configure information-processing resources for the execution of computationally intensive, nonroutine tasks (Miller & Cohen, 2001). The student's moment-by-moment decision is thus between a gainful activity that demands robust cognitive control and alternatives that do not.Cognitive labor/leisure decisions play an obvious role in determining academic and career performance. They may also have safety implications in settings such as air-traffic control or power-plant operation; neuroimaging research shows that lapses of attention and response errors are preceded by a shift in activation from dorsal cortical areas underlying cognitive control to a default-mode network that is characteristically most active at rest (Eichele et al., 2008;Weissman, Roberts, Visscher, & Woldorff, 2006). Furthermore, cognitive labor/ leisure decisions may go awry in clinical disorders like depression or addiction, leading to maladaptive decision-making (Baler & Volkow, 2006;Murphy et al., 2001;van der Plas, Crone, van den Wildenberg, Tranel, & Bechara, 2008;Wenzlaff & Bates, 1998). Given these and other considerations, it is important to understand how such decisions are made.Recent behavioral and neuroscientific research indicates that the exertion of cognitive control is intrinsically costly or aversive, and that control is only robustly recruited in the presence of relevant in...

The Expected Value of Control: An Integrative Theory of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Function

“…1). As reviewed earlier, behavioral evidence supports the idea that the exertion of control is associated with subjective disutility manifest as the avoidance of control-demanding tasks (Kool and Botvinick, in press; Kool et al, 2010). The EVC model proposes that the dACC registers the costs of control in a manner that is proportional to the intensity of control and that it specifies control signals in a way that is sensitive to such costs.…”

“…That is, people spontaneously seek to minimize it. Recent empirical work bears out this assumption, linking effort specifically to the exertion of cognitive control (Kool and Botvinick, in press; Kool et al, 2010). Human decision-makers show a bias against tasks demanding top-down control, and within certain bounds they will delay task goals or even forego reward in order to avoid such tasks (Dixon and Christoff, 2012; Kool et al, 2010; Westbrook et al, in press).…”

“…1 captures the intrinsic cost of control, which is presumed to be a monotonic function of control-signal intensity (although for a richer model, see Kool and Botvinick, in press). In sum, Eq.…”

“…These relationships determine the function relating EVC to intensity, and the optimum occurs at a point where the slope of that function is zero. Under plausible assumptions about the shape of the payoff and cost functions (see Kool and Botvinick, in press), the optimal control signal intensity will rise with the magnitude of task incentives (see Figure 4A-B). This predicts that dACC activity should grow both with task difficulty and with the stakes associated with task performance.…”

Multitasking versus multiplexing: Toward a normative account of limitations in the simultaneous execution of control-demanding behaviors

“…Of course, introspection, traditional dogma (e.g. Posner & Snyder, 1975), and recent experimental findings (Kool et al, 2010; Kool & Botvinick, 2012; Dixon & Christoff, 2012; Westbrook et al, 2013) all suggest that the exertion of control does carry an intrinsic cost, in the form of “mental effort.” An intriguing explanation for this may be that such costs, experienced as subjective disutility, reflect intrinsic biases limiting the engagement of control signals in order to minimize the risk of cross-task.…”