Effort Avoidance Research Articles

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Fixed-Ratio Avoidance Response Effort and Unavoidable Shock Extinction in Humans

Avoidance of potential threat may become maladaptive when it is indiscriminate and resistant to change. Here, we investigated the resistance to change of high and low avoidance response effort when avoidance extinction involved unavoidable presentations of the aversive event (shock) in humans. Following fear conditioning, participants prevented upcoming shock delivery by responding on high (i.e., fixed ratio, FR-20) and low (FR-5) negative reinforcement schedules. Next, noneliminable shock was used for an avoidance extinction procedure whereby responding was followed by, rather than prevented, shock. During a subsequent standard extinction and response prevention test phase, we found that High effort (FR-20) avoidance would be more readily extinguished than Low effort (FR-5) avoidance. It was also predicted that fear, threat expectancy, and psychophysiological (skin conductance) responses would decrease on avoidable trials and increase on unavoidable trials before extinguishing to low levels. It was found that in the final extinction re-test phase when avoidance was possible, responding increased, particularly for low effort cues. Both fear and expectancy remained high. Individual differences on clinically relevant measures of trait anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty and experiential avoidance were associated with greater levels of fear and threat expectancy. Overall, unavoidable shock extinction may hold promise for further translational investigations of avoidance learning, extinction, and clinical treatment development.

Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.

Effortful tasks are generally experienced as costly, but the value of work varies greatly across individuals and populations. While most mental health conditions are characterized by amotivation and effort avoidance, individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) persistently engage in effortful behaviors that most people find unrewarding (food restriction, excessive exercise). Current models of AN differentially attribute such extreme weight-control behavior to altered reward responding and exaggerated cognitive control. In a novel test of these theoretical accounts, we employed an established cognitive effort discounting paradigm in combination with fMRI in young acutely underweight female patients with AN (n = 48) and age-matched healthy controls (HC; n = 48). Contrary to the hypothesis that individuals with AN would experience cognitive effort (operationalized as N-back task performance) as less costly than HC participants, groups did not differ in the subjective value (SV) of discounted rewards or in SV-related activation of brain regions involved in reward valuation. Rather, all group differences in both behavior (superior N-back performance in AN and associated effort ratings) and fMRI activation (increased SV-related frontoparietal activation during decision-making in AN even for easier choices) were more indicative of increased control. These findings suggest that while effort discounting may be relatively intact in AN, effort investment is high both when performing demanding tasks and during effort-based decision-making; highlighting cognitive overcontrol as an important therapeutic target. Future research should establish whether exaggerated control during effort-based decision-making persists after weight-recovery and explore learning the value of effort in AN with tasks involving disorder-relevant effort demands and rewards.

Investigating an effort avoidance account of attentional strategy choice.

People often choose suboptimal attentional control strategies during visual search. This has been at least partially attributed to the avoidance of the cognitive effort associated with the optimal strategy, but aspects of the task triggering such avoidance remain unclear. Here, we attempted to measure effort avoidance of an isolated task component to assess whether this component might drive suboptimal behavior. We adopted a modified version of the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to measure people's visual search strategies. To perform optimally, participants must make a numerosity judgment-estimating and comparing two color sets-before they can advantageously search through the less numerous of the two. If participants skip the numerosity judgment step, they can still perform accurately, albeit substantially more slowly. To study whether effort associated with performing the optional numerosity judgment could be an obstacle to optimal performance, we created a variant of the demand selection task to quantify the avoidance of numerosity judgment effort. Results revealed a robust avoidance of the numerosity judgment, offering a potential explanation for why individuals choose suboptimal strategies in the ACVS task. Nevertheless, we did not find a significant relationship between individual numerosity judgment avoidance and ACVS optimality, and we discussed potential reasons for this lack of an observed relationship. Altogether, our results showed that the effort avoidance for specific subcomponents of a visual search task can be probed and linked to overall strategy choices.

Action control costs in task selection: Agents avoid actions with incompatible movement and effect features.

When a movement triggers effects with incompatible features, conflict between action and effect features creates costs for action planning and initiation. We investigated whether such action control costs also factor into action choices in terms of the principle of least effort. Participants completed a reaction-time experiment, where they were instructed to perform left and right mouse swipes in response to directional cues presented on the screen. Participants could select between two action options on each trial: Depending on which part of the screen (upper or lower) the action was performed in, the swipe resulted in a visual stimulus moving in the same (compatible) or in the opposite (incompatible) direction as the mouse. Incompatible action-effect mappings did indeed incur action control costs. In accordance with effort avoidance, the proportion of compatible choices was significantly above chance level, suggesting that action selection and initiation costs factor into participants preferences. Interestingly, however, participants' choice tendencies were not predicted by the actual increase in action-initiation costs in the incompatible condition. This indicates that effort-related decisions are not simply based on monitoring performance in the actual task, but they are also influenced by preestablished notions of action-planning costs.

Policy abstraction as a predictor of cognitive effort avoidance.

Consistent evidence has established that people avoid cognitively effortful tasks. However, the features that make a task cognitively effortful are still not well understood. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed regarding which task demands underlie cognitive effort costs, such as time-on-task, error likelihood, and the general engagement of cognitive control. In this study, we test the novel hypothesis that tasks requiring behavior according to higher degrees of policy abstraction are experienced as more effortful. Accordingly, policy abstraction, operationalized as the levels of contextual contingency required by task rules, drives task avoidance over and above the effects of task performance, such as time-on-task or error likelihood. To test this hypothesis, we combined two previously established cognitive control tasks that parametrically manipulated policy abstraction with the demand selection task procedure. The design of these tasks allowed us to test whether people avoided tasks with higher order policy abstraction while controlling for the contribution of factors such as time-on-task and expected error rate (ER). Consistent with our hypothesis, we observed that policy abstraction was the strongest predictor of cognitive effort choices, followed by ER. This was evident across both studies and in a within-subject cross-study analysis. These results establish at least one task feature independent of performance, which is predictive of task avoidance behavior. We interpret these results within an opportunity cost framework for understanding aversive experiences of cognitive effort while performing a task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Need for cognition moderates the relief of avoiding cognitive effort.

When making decisions, humans aim to maximize rewards while minimizing costs. The exertion of mental or physical effort has been proposed to be one those costs, translating into avoidance of behaviors carrying effort demands. This motivational framework also predicts that people should experience positive affect when anticipating demand that is subsequently avoided (i.e., a "relief effect"), but evidence for this prediction is scarce. Here, we follow up on a previous study [1] that provided some initial evidence that people more positively evaluated outcomes if it meant they could avoid performing an additional demanding task. However, the results from this study did not provide conclusive evidence that this effect was driven by effort avoidance. Here, we report two experiments that are able to do this. Participants performed a gambling task, and if they did not receive reward they would have to perform an orthogonal effort task. Prior to the gamble, a cue indicated whether this effort task would be easy or hard. We probed hedonic responses to the reward-related feedback, as well as after the subsequent effort task feedback. Participants reported lower hedonic responses for no-reward outcomes when high vs. low effort was anticipated (and later exerted). They also reported higher hedonic responses for reward outcomes when high vs. low effort was anticipated (and avoided). Importantly, this relief effect was smaller in participants with high need for cognition. These results suggest that avoidance of high effort tasks is rewarding, but that the size off this effect depends on the individual disposition to engage with and expend cognitive effort. They also raise the important question of whether this disposition alters the cost of effort per se, or rather offset this cost during cost-benefit analyses.

Combating effort avoidance in computer adaptive practicing: Does a problem-skipping restriction promote learning?

Effort is key in learning, as evidenced by its omnipresence in both empirical findings and educational theory. At the same time, students are consistently found to avoid effort. In this study, we investigate whether limiting effort avoidance improves learning outcomes. We also examine differences in learning outcomes for a substantive typology of students: toilers (practice many problems), skippers (skip many problems), and rushers (provide fast responses). In a large-scale computer adaptive practice system for primary education, over 1 50 000 participants were distributed across four conditions in which a problem-skipping option was delayed by 0, 3, 6, or 9 s. The results show that after a 14-week period, there are no average treatment effects on learning outcomes across conditions. Also, no consistent conditional average treatment effects are found across the typology. However, different types of students have different learning outcomes, showing that the typology used is meaningful. We conclude that the scale of the experiment suggests a precise null finding, but caution that this should not be interpreted as evidence of no effect. Problem-skipping restrictions may require a longer-lasting implementation to accumulate the desired effect.

ADHD and the avoidance of mental effort: the role of response inhibition and avoidance motivation

ABSTRACT Objective The tendency of people with ADHD to avoid tasks that require mental effort impacts their academic achievement. Findings in the literature suggest that children with ADHD find cognitive tasks more effortful and uncomfortable than their typically developing peers. However, neuropsychological processes contributing to this remain unclear. The present study investigated whether the relationship between prepotent motor response inhibition and avoiding mental effort is mediated by the ability to resist avoidance motivation and whether this proposed mediation mechanism is contingent on ADHD diagnosis. Method 40 children with ADHD and 40 gender and age-matched typically developing peers participated in the study. They completed the Cognitive Effort Avoidance Measure, the Go/No-go Task, and the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory-Personality Questionnaire-Children. Mediation and moderated mediation analyses were employed to test the hypotheses. Results Children with ADHD scored lower in response inhibition and resisting avoidance motivation. Poorer scores in these variables were associated with a higher avoidance rate. Moreover, the ability to resist avoidance motivation completely mediated the relationship between response inhibition and avoidance rate only among children with ADHD. Conclusion Findings imply that poorer response inhibition led to an increase in avoidance motivation among children with ADHD, which becomes challenging to regulate effectively due to an impairment in the ability to resist avoidance motivation. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Social Rejection but Not Ostracism Increases Cognitive Effort Avoidance.

Social exclusion has been found to have a significant impact on cognitive control processing. However, the existing research on this topic has yielded inconsistent findings, possibly due to variations in the type of exclusion and individuals' cognitive effort. Two studies were conducted to explore the influence of social rejection and ostracism on cognitive effort avoidance. Study 1 involved forty-six adults who were randomly divided into a rejection group and a control group using a get-acquainted paradigm. The demand selection task (DST) was used to measure cognitive effort avoidance. In Study 2, forty-eight adults were recruited, Cyberball and DST paradigms were used to evoke ostracism and test cognitive effort avoidance, respectively. The results of study 1 showed that individuals who were socially rejected by their partners exhibited impaired response accuracy of cognitive control and increased cognitive effort avoidance. This indicates that social rejection has a negative impact on cognitive control processing and that individuals may be more likely to avoid cognitive effort when experiencing social rejection. The results of study 2 showed that ostracism had an impact on both response speed and accuracy, but it did not significantly affect cognitive effort avoidance. This indicates that social rejection affects cognitive control processing differently than ostracism, and individuals are more likely to avoid cognitive effort when experiencing social rejection. These findings suggest that social rejection and ostracism have different effects on cognitive effort, which may contribute to the inconsistent cognitive performance during social exclusion. Future research may explore the underlying mechanisms that lead to these differences and examine how individuals can mitigate the negative effects of social exclusion on cognitive control processing.

Vocational training support and innovation at SMEs

Purpose While the value of human capital for technological innovation is well acknowledged, literature on the role of vocational training in corporate innovation is notably scarce. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of government support for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) competencies on Korean firms’ innovation. The author investigates SMEs’ patent applications (supported by the government to varying degrees) while accounting for firms’ market position, ownership and management structure, as well as prior changes in firms’ technologies, products, processes and other characteristics. Alternative hypotheses about management motivation – the “lazy manager”, “career concerns” and “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses – are also evaluated. Design/methodology/approach Censored and count data analysis methods are used on a panel of 595 Korean firms covering 2005–2015 from the Korean Human Capital Corporate Survey, Intellectual Property Office and National Investment Commission. A regression discontinuity estimator accounts for potential endogeneity because of support for vocational training at firms. Findings Firms receiving training support are more innovative than firms without support, but latent effects may play a role. The regression-discontinuity model suggests that firms that succeeded only marginally in obtaining support had higher innovative output than non-recipients near the eligibility threshold. Originality/value The findings of this study establish that government support had the intended effect on SMEs’ technological capacity. This cannot be discounted as a simple crowding-out effect. The author also establishes that management–ownership separation within firms was conducive to innovation, that product competition had an inverse U-shaped effect and that management–ownership separation had a substitutable relationship with competition in overcoming managers’ effort avoidance. The findings support the “lazy manager” hypothesis over the “career concerns” and the “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses.

Initiative apathy trait underlies individual differences in the ability to anticipate and expend cognitive effort in cost-benefit decision-making tasks.

Initiative apathy is the most disabling form of apathy, prevalent both in neuropsychiatric pathologies and in the healthy population. This apathy has been specifically associated with functional abnormalities of the anterior cingulate cortex, a key structure underlying Effort-based Decision-Making (EDM). The main aim of the present study was to explore, for the first time, the cognitive and neural effort mechanisms of initiative apathy, by distinguishing the steps of effort anticipation and effort expenditure and the potential modulating effect of motivation. We conducted an EEG study in 23 subjects with specific subclinical initiative apathy and 24 healthy subjects with no apathy. The subjects had to complete two effort tasks. The analysis of behavioral choices, CNV, and mPFC theta power highlighted that initiative apathy is associated with effort avoidance and impairments of effort anticipation and effort expenditure that suggest EDM deficits. Better knowledge of these impairments should aid the development of new, more targeted therapeutic interventions necessary for reducing the debilitating consequences of initiative apathy.

Is all mental effort equal? The role of cognitive demand-type on effort avoidance

Humans are often termed “cognitive misers” for their aversion to mental effort. Both in and outside the laboratory people often show preferences for low-effort tasks and are willing to forgo financial reward to avoid more demanding alternatives. Mental effort, however, does not seem to be ubiquitously avoided: people play crosswords, board games, and read novels, all as forms of leisure. While such activities undoubtedly require effort, the type of cognitive demands they impose appear markedly different from the tasks typically used in psychological research on mental effort (e.g., N-Back, Stroop Task, vigilance tasks). We investigate the effect disparate demands, such as tasks which require problem solving (e.g., solve the missing number: 1, 3, 7, 15, 31,?) compared to those which require rule-implementation (e.g., N-Back task), have on people's aversion to or preference for increased mental effort. Across four experiments using three different tasks, and a mixture of online and lab-based settings, we find that aversion to effort remains largely stable regardless of the types of cognitive demands a task imposes. The results are discussed in terms of other factors that might induce the pursuit of mental effort over and above the type of cognitive demands imposed by a task.

Supplemental Material for Policy Abstraction as a Predictor of Cognitive Effort Avoidance

Supplemental Material for Policy Abstraction as a Predictor of Cognitive Effort Avoidance

Attentional strategy and effort avoidance: the role of environmental appraisal

Attentional strategy and effort avoidance: the role of environmental appraisal

The role of objective and introspective switch costs in voluntary task choice.

Human beings are cognitive misers. One facet of this effort avoidance is the reluctance to voluntarily switch tasks when repeating the same task is allowed. Yet participants voluntarily switch despite the resulting costs. This paradox might be resolved if the individual switching ability or sensitivity is considered. Here, we investigated whether the voluntary switch rate (VSR) is governed by the objective or the subjective (introspective) switch costs. Three experiments were conducted utilizing voluntary task switching with forced and free task choices intermixed. In Experiments 1 and 3, objective switch costs were measured on forced tasks, and subjective switch costs were calculated from (introspectively) estimated reaction times in a separate phase. In Experiment 2, objective and subjective costs were measured in the same phase. In Experiments 2 and 3, we additionally manipulated the forced switch rate. Results show that objective and subjective switch costs were lower in blocks with higher forced switch rates. The objective switch costs predicted VSR in Experiments 1 and (partially) 3. The subjective switch costs predicted the VSR only in Experiment 3 (the lower the costs, the higher the VSR). Hence, the present study offers first insight into under which circumstances introspection guides decision-making during voluntary task switching. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Effort avoidance as a core mechanism of apathy in frontotemporal dementia.

Apathy is a core symptom in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). It is defined by the observable reduction in goal-directed behaviour, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. According to decision theory, engagement in goal-directed behaviour depends on a cost-benefit optimization trading off the estimated effort (related to the behaviour) against the expected reward (related to the goal). In this framework, apathy would thus result from either a decreased appetence for reward, or from an increased aversion to effort. Here, we phenotyped the motivational state of 21 patients with bvFTD and 40 matched healthy controls using computational analyses of behavioural responses in a comprehensive series of behavioural tasks, involving both expression of preference (comparing reward value and effort cost) and optimization of performance (adjusting effort production to the reward at stake). The primary finding was an elevated aversion to effort, consistent across preference and performance tasks in patients with bvFTD compared to controls. Within the bvFTD group, effort avoidance was correlated to cortical atrophy in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and to apathy score measured on a clinical scale. Thus, our results highlight elevated effort aversion (not reduced reward appetence) as a core dysfunction that might generate apathy in patients with bvFTD. More broadly, they provide novel behavioural tests and computational tools to identify the dysfunctional mechanisms producing motivation deficits in patients with brain damage.

Cognitive effort avoidance in veterans with suicide attempt histories

Suicide attempts (SA) are increasing in the United States, especially in veterans. Discovering individual cognitive features of the subset of suicide ideators who attempt suicide is critical. Cognitive theories attribute SA to facile schema-based negative interpretations of environmental events. Over-general autobiographical memory and facile solutions in problem solving tasks in SA survivors suggest that aversion to expending cognitive effort may be a neurobehavioral marker of SA risk. In veterans receiving care for mood disorder, we compared cognitive effort discounting and evidence-gathering in a beads task between veterans with (SAHx+; n = 26) versus without (SAHx-; n = 22) a history of SA. Groups did not differ in depressed mood or in a proxy metric of premorbid intelligence. Compared to SAHx- participants, SAHx+ participants self-reported significantly more severe cognitive problems in most domains, and also eschewed choice to earn higher monetary reward if earning it required a slightly increased working memory (WM) demand relative to an easy WM task. There was no group difference, however, in extent of evidence-gathering before declaring a conclusion in a beads task. These preliminary data suggest that aversion to expenditure of cognitive effort, potentially as a component of cognitive difficulties, may be a marker for SA risk.

Effort(less) exam preparation: Math anxiety predicts the avoidance of effortful study strategies.

Previous research suggests that math anxiety, or feelings of apprehension about math, leads individuals to engage in math avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their future math performance. However, much of the research on this topic explores global avoidance behaviors in situations where math can be avoided entirely rather than more localized avoidance behaviors that occur within a mathematics context. Since the option to completely avoid math is not common in most formal education systems, we investigated how and if math avoidance behaviors manifest for math-anxious high school students enrolled in math courses. Given previous research highlighting the utility of effortful study strategies as well as recent findings identifying a relation between math anxiety and the avoidance of math-related effort, we hypothesized that math anxiety would be associated with decreased planned engagement of effortful study strategies by students and that such effort avoidance would result in worse performance on a high-stakes mathematics exam. We found (N = 190) that the majority of students ranked problem-solving as the most effortful study strategy and that math anxiety was associated with less planned engagement with effortful problem-solving during studying. Moreover, the avoidance of effortful problem-solving engagement partially mediated the association between math anxiety and exam performance, marking it as a potential target for intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Inattentive Inference

AbstractThis paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise-irrelevant taste. This creates an attribution problem common to all information structures with multiple causes. We report controlled experimental evidence for pervasive overinference about states that affect utility—a form of “omitted variable bias” in belief updating, providing an explanation for various misattribution patterns. In studying why systematic misattribution arises, we consistently find that errors are not due to deliberate effort avoidance or a lack of cognitive capacity. Instead, people behave as if they form incomplete mental models of the information structure and fail to notice the need to account for alternative causes. These mental models are not stable but context-dependent: Misattribution responds to a variety of attentional manipulations, but not to changes in the costs of inattention.

The Easier-Is-Better Heuristic: The False Allure of Easy Work

People are highly sensitive to effort expenditure and have an evolved goal to minimize it. As such, people tend to favor tasks that are easier over more difficult tasks. However, there are several downsides to reducing task demand, such as experiencing boredom, that make easier tasks less enjoyable. Across six studies, we examine people’s beliefs about the relationship between task demand and task enjoyment. We find that people inaccurately anticipate that making a task less demanding will increase its enjoyability (Study 1). We extend our findings to a more objective conceptualization of task demand (Study 2) and find that the effect persists even when tasks are familiar (Study 3). We test our proposed mechanism that people fail to consider other task dimensions that impact task enjoyment because effort avoidance is a highly salient goal (Study 4). In Study 5 we find that people accurately anticipate that challenging, yet attainable, tasks will be more enjoyable than tasks which exceed their abilities. Finally, in Study 6 we surveyed working professionals to test the implication of the effect on job satisfaction and retention. Taken together, these results suggest that people operate on an “easier-is- better” heuristic, meaning they believe that any decrease in task demand will lead to an increase in task enjoyment. These beliefs matter because they likely guide people’s decisions about what work to pursue and what work to avoid.