The transdiagnostic structure of mental effort avoidance

Abstract

The law of least mental effort states that, everything else being equal, the brain tries to minimize mental effort expenditure during task performance by avoiding decisions that require greater cognitive demands. Prior studies have shown associations between disruptions in effort expenditure and specific psychiatric illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia and depression) or clinically-related symptoms and traits (e.g., anhedonia and apathy), yet no research has explored this issue transdiagnostically. Specifically, this research has largely focused on a single diagnostic category, symptom, or trait. However, abnormalities in effort expression could be related to several different psychiatrically-relevant constructs that cut across diagnostic boundaries. Therefore, we examined the relationship between avoidance of mental effort and a diverse set of clinically-related symptoms and traits, and transdiagnostic latent factors in a large sample (n = 811). Only lack of perseverance, a dimension of impulsiveness, was associated with increased avoidance of mental effort. In contrast, several constructs were associated with less mental effort avoidance, including positive urgency, distress intolerance, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, disordered eating, and a factor consisting of compulsive behavior and intrusive thoughts. These findings demonstrate that deviations from normative effort expenditure are associated with a number of constructs that are common to several forms of psychiatric illness.

Acute Psychosocial Stress Increases Cognitive-Effort Avoidance

“…Echoing previous work (Kool et al, 2010; Patzelt et al, 2019), results showed that, overall, participants preferred the low-demand option on both sessions, but more interestingly, acute stress increased participants’ preferences for effort avoidance (see Fig. 3), as evidenced by a larger percentage of low-demand choices in the stress condition ( M = 61.53%, SD = 16.47) than in the control condition ( M = 56.16%, SD = 16.30).…”

“…Participants are neither rewarded for good performance nor receive any potentially rewarding performance-related feedback during the task. Thus, preferences for the low-demand cue should primarily result from aversion to cognitive effort (Patzelt et al, 2019). Here, the mapping of visual cue to demand level remained constant within participants but was counterbalanced across participants.…”

“…More frequent switches of the to-be-performed task require participants to flexibly alternate between task rules, so they demand greater sustained investment of cognitive effort (Liu & Yeung, 2020). Under normal circumstances, individuals reliably gravitate to the low-demand option in the DST (Kool et al, 2010; Patzelt et al, 2019), indicating a general or default preference for less cognitively effortful courses of action.…”

Boosting model-based control in older adults

“…The study and experimental protocols followed ethical guidelines and were approved by the Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (CUHS), the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Harvard University. A subset of 377 young adults (<= age 30) and 47 older adults (>= age 56) were selected from a larger study conducted on AMT that examined relationships between psychopathology and model-based control (Patzelt et al, 2019a); and separately, psychopathology and mental effort (Patzelt, Kool, Millner, & Gershman, 2019b). All participants were required to have U.S. residency, 90% approval rating, and 100 completed Mechanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks.…”

A least action principle for interceptive walking

“…In the study of human behavior, these principles have inspired the principle of least effort, which was used to explain the power-law form of the rank-frequency distribution of words in the English language 6 , and subsequently a diverse range of phenomena such as crowd behavior 7 and even mental effort 8 . These studies have found predictable patterns in distributions arising from human behaviors, which individually are variable and unpredictable.…”