The propensity for people to avoid mentally demanding tasks in the absence of reward is well documented. As a result, humans are often described as cognitive misers. This characterisation, while consistent with the psychological literature, contradicts everyday instances of effort being sought: reading, board games, and brain-teasing puzzles. Such examples however are markedly different from the types of tasks typically used in the mental effort literature (e.g., working memory tasks, demand selection tasks). The current set of experiments assessed whether the type of task (i.e., N-Back, Number Sequence Problems [NSP], or Anagrams) affects people’s aversion to, or desire for, increased effort. On average, across 3 experiments, participants showed an aversion to effort regardless of whether the effort required was more attentional (N-Back) or cognitive (NSP and anagrams) in nature, and were willing to forgo financial reward in order to avoid more difficult tasks. A minority of participants, however, sought more effortful tasks for equal or lesser reward.

People’s desire to seek or avoid information is not only influenced by the possible outcomes of an event, but the probability of those particular outcomes occurring. There are competing explanations however as to how and why people’s desire for non-instrumental information is affected by factors including expected value, probability of outcome, and a unique formulation of outcome uncertainty. Over two experiments, we find that people’s preference for non-instrumental information is positively correlated with probability when the outcome is positive (i.e., winning money) and negatively correlated when the outcome is negative (i.e., losing money). Furthermore, at the aggregate level, we find the probability of an outcome to be a better predictor of information preference than the expected value of the event or its outcome uncertainty.

People tend to place value on information even when it doesnot affect the outcome of a decision. Two competingaccounts offer explanations for such non-instrumentalinformation seeking. One account foregrounds the role ofanticipation and the other focusses on uncertainty aversion.Both accounts make similar predictions for short cue-outcome delays and when outcomes are positively valenced,but they differ in their explanation of information preferenceat long delays with negative outcomes. We present a seriesof experiments involving both primary and secondaryreinforcers that pit these accounts against each other. Theresults indicate a consistent preference for non-instrumentalinformation even at long cue-outcome delays and noevidence for information avoidance with negative outcomes.This pattern appears to provide more support for theuncertainty-aversion account than one based on anticipation.