Abstract
A central factor in research guided by the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the mental effort people invest in performing a task. Mental effort is commonly assessed by asking people to report their effort throughout performing, learning, or problem-solving tasks. Although this measurement is considered reliable and valid in CLT research, metacognitive research provides robust evidence that self-appraisals of performance are often biased. In this review, we consider the possibility that mental effort appraisals may also be biased. In particular, we review signs for covariations and mismatches between subjective and objective measures of effort. Our review suggests that subjective and most objective effort measures appear reliable and valid when evaluated in isolation, because they discriminate among tasks of varying complexity. However, not much is known about their mutual correspondence—that is, whether subjective measures covariate with objective measures. Moreover, there is evidence that people utilize heuristic cues when appraising their effort, similar to utilization of heuristic cues underlying metacognitive appraisals of performance. These cues are identified by exposing biases—mismatch in effects of cue variations on appraisals and performance. The review concludes with a research agenda in which we suggest applying the well-established methodologies for studying biases in self-appraisals of performance in metacognitive research to investigating effort appraisals. One promising method could be to determine the covariation of effort appraisals and objective effort measures as an indicator of the resolution of effort appraisals.
Highlights
While performing daily cognitively demanding tasks, like navigating, designing, decision making, solving problems, and learning new information, people constantly regulate their mental effort, that is, the amount of cognitive resources they allocate to achieve their goal of performing the task
A central factor in research guided by the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the mental effort people invest in performing a task
The possibility that subjective appraisals of effort might be based on heuristic cues and might not be tightly associated with the cognitive resources allocated to accomplish the task demands may be astonishing for some researchers and absolutely not surprising for others
Summary
While performing daily cognitively demanding tasks, like navigating, designing, decision making, solving problems, and learning new information, people constantly regulate their mental effort, that is, the amount of cognitive resources they allocate to achieve their goal of performing the task. Koriat et al (2014b) succeeded in manipulating the way people interpret their effort, to be called for by the task item or stemming from their inner motivation They achieved this by only changing the phrasing of the question on the appraisal scale to be “1 (The paragraph required little study) to 9 (The paragraph required a great deal of study) “for activating assessment of data-driven effort (or mental load) versus “1 (I chose to invest little study) to 9 (I chose to invest a great deal of study)” for activating assessment of goal-driven effort (or mental effort) (see Fisher and Oyserman 2017; Koriat 2018). A person’s interpretation of effort assessments may vary depending on the exact formulation and framing of the question as well as on interindividual differences
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