Dispositional Cognitive Effort Investment and Behavioral Demand Avoidance: Are They Related?

Abstract

Individuals tend to avoid cognitive demand, yet, individual differences appear to exist. Recent evidence from two studies suggests that individuals high in the personality traits Self-Control and Need for Cognition that are related to the broader construct Cognitive Effort Investment are less prone to avoid cognitive demand and show less effort discounting. These findings suggest that cost-benefit models of decision-making that integrate the costs due to effort should consider individual differences in the willingness to exert mental effort. However, to date, there are almost no replication attempts of the above findings. For the present conceptual replication, we concentrated on the avoidance of cognitive demand and used a longitudinal design and latent state-trait modeling. This approach enabled us to separate the trait-specific variance in our measures of Cognitive Effort Investment and Demand Avoidance that is due to stable, individual differences from the variance that is due to the measurement occasion, the methods used, and measurement error. Doing so allowed us to test the assumption that self-reported Cognitive Effort Investment is related to behavioral Demand Avoidance more directly by relating their trait-like features to each other. In a sample of N = 217 participants, we observed both self-reported Cognitive Effort Investment and behavioral Demand Avoidance to exhibit considerable portions of trait variance. However, these trait variances were not significantly related to each other. Thus, our results call into question previous findings of a relationship between self-reported effort investment and demand avoidance. We suggest that novel paradigms are needed to emulate real-world effortful situations and enable better mapping between self-reported measures and behavioral markers of the willingness to exert cognitive effort.

Correlation Analysis between Early Reading Amount and Expressive Ability of Young Children Aided by Multiple Information Processing Techniques under the Heuristic Pattern

“…en, the variables of early reading volume were included to build model (12), represented as Reading i , and it was determined whether early reading volume had a good explanatory power by observing changes in R 2 .…”

“…First of all, the dominant effects mainly refer to reading and expression ability, and both belong to the category of cognitive dimension. e individual's early reading can also be regarded as a kind of capital accumulation for the future cognitive behavior [12]. To master certain cognitive ability, the individual makes cognitive investment.…”

Effort Foraging Task reveals positive correlation between individual differences in the cost of cognitive and physical effort in humans

“…In a related vein, our study also illustrates the potential value in studying the relationship between empirically measured, quantifiable forms of effort costs (both cognitive and physical) and affective factors relevant to mental health, such as apathy, anhedonia and depression. One promising extension would be to combine this approach with methods of ecological momentary assessment (Krönke et al, 2021; Strobel et al, 2020).…”

Dispositional individual differences in cognitive effort investment: establishing the core construct

“…Responses to items (e.g., "Even when I feel energized, I can usually sit still without much trouble if it's necessary") are given on a 7-point Likert scale from − 3 (disagree strongly) to + 3 (agree strongly). Internal consistency of the scale is acceptable (Cronbach's α = 0.74 [27]), and 5-week retest reliability is good with r tt = 0.80 [47].…”

“…Exclusion criteria were psychological, psychiatric or neurological dysfunctions, substance misuse, psychotropic medication, and other reasons for non-participation. We aimed at a sample size of N = 200 for other analyses reported separately [47].…”