The Subjective Value of Cognitive Effort is Encoded by a Domain-General Valuation Network

Abstract

Cognitive control is necessary for goal-directed behavior, yet people treat cognitive control demand as a cost, which discounts the value of rewards in a similar manner as other costs, such as delay or risk. It is unclear, however, whether the subjective value (SV) of cognitive effort is encoded in the same putatively domain-general brain valuation network implicated in other cost domains, or instead engages a distinct frontoparietal network, as implied by recent studies. Here, we provide rigorous evidence that the valuation network, with core foci in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, also encodes SV during cognitive effort-based decision-making in healthy, male and female adult humans. We doubly dissociate this network from frontoparietal regions that are instead recruited as a function of decision difficulty. We show that the domain-general valuation network jointly and independently encodes both reward benefits and cognitive effort costs. We also demonstrate that cognitive effort SV signals predict choice and are influenced by state and trait motivation, including sensitivity to reward and anticipated task performance. These findings unify cognitive effort with other cost domains, and suggest candidate neural mechanisms underlying state and trait variation in willingness to expend cognitive effort.

Dissociable Motivational Deficits in Pre-manifest Huntington’s Disease

“… 64 Similarly, human imaging studies have implicated the ventral striatum and its prefrontal connections in the valuation of both physical 1 , 74 and cognitive effort costs. 1 , 2 , 75 , 76 Taken together, the spatiotemporal progression of HD could therefore lead to differential effects on motivation in the cognitive and physical domains, with pathways affected earlier in the course of HD preferentially involved in cognitive relative to physical motivation.…”

“…A growing body of work has implicated the striatum and its connections to the prefrontal cortex as the core of a decision-making network critical to motivated behavior. 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 The importance of this network to motivation is exemplified by the frequency of apathy in disorders such as Huntington’s disease (HD), which are characterized by dysfunction to the striatum and its cortical connections. Apathy is a disorder of motivation that can be particularly debilitating and have a significant effect on quality of life, but relatively little is known about its underlying mechanisms.…”

Losses Motivate Cognitive Effort More Than Gains in Effort-Based Decision Making and Performance

“…Working memory has been studied previously in the context of cognitive effort. A higher working memory load is experienced as more effortful (Bijleveld, 2018), and is associated with physiological and neural signs of increased effort (Kahneman and Beatty, 1966;Jansma et al, 2007;Richter et al, 2008), and effort-discounting (Westbrook et al, 2013(Westbrook et al, , 2019. In this experiment, we examined whether effort allocation in the N-Back task would be differentially affected by gains and losses.…”

Forced choices reveal a trade-off between cognitive effort and physical pain

“…If the first question is true, we can then make the striking prediction that people will accept physical pain to avoid exerting cognitive effort. To examine these questions, participants performed a simple economic decision-making task (e.g., Westbrook et al, 2013;Westbrook, Lamichhane, & Braver, 2019) where they had to choose between performing a cognitively demanding task or receiving painful thermal stimuli to avoid exerting effort.…”