The law of least mental effort suggests that humans seek to minimize cognitive effort exertion. It is thought that we do so because effort is inherently aversive, playing the cost function in a cost-benefit analysis. However, this is not always the case: Some human activities are valued precisely because they are effortful. This dual nature of effort as valued and costly is known as the Effort Paradox. The question is therefore: what features differentiate an aversively effortful task from a valued one? In the current study, we explore how perceived progress might be one of these features. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that people willfully choose to engage in more demanding cognitive tasks when doing so yields telegraphed progress information. These results suggest that perceived progress may play a moderating role in cognitive effort aversion and hints at the possibility that progress itself may be an inherently valuable stimulus.

Impact of effort exertion on cognitive flexibility and stabilityAnna Mini Jos, Myles LoParco, A. Ross Otto*Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montral, CanadaEfficient task execution requires attention to task requirements while inhibiting distractors (cognitive stability) and adapt-ing to changes (flexibility). Previous studies have shown that individuals differ in their application of stable versus flexibleprocessing modes. Our study examined the impact of prior effort exertion on flexibility/stability trade-off.Participants performed a stability-flexibility paradigm, with pupil recording, before and after effort and no-effort manipula-tions were induced using different tasks. We analyzed the resulting change in preferences for stability/flexibility (voluntaryswitch rate).We found that the no-effort condition evoked a higher voluntary switch rate than baseline or after effort exertion. Partici-pants in the effort condition also showed higher response times and lower accuracy across trials. Pupil data shows that aftereffort exertion participants exert less effort in spontaneous switches and repeats. Additionally, the relationship betweenswitch cost (on forced-switch trials) and spontaneous switching rate increased after effort exertion. These results suggestthat stability/flexibility preferences can vary with prior effort exertion.

Response inhibition—our ability to suppress actions—is achieved through coordinated reactive and proactive processes that may recruit different neurophysiological mechanisms. Here we adapted a two-step continuous performance task in which the decision to respond depends on a combination of an initial context cue and a subsequent target probe. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we mapped changes in corticospinal excitability and inhibition, providing indices of reactive and proactive processes that influence the state of the motor system in the lead-up to initiating or suppressing a response. We found distinct changes in corticospinal excitability at critical timepoints when participants were preparing in advance to inhibit a response (during the cue) and while inhibiting a response (during the probe). Motor system activity during early timepoints correlated with behavioural indices of proactive capacity and predicted whether participants would later successfully inhibit their response. Implications for theories of inhibitory control will be discussed.

We investigated whether bilingualism affects non-verbal model-free vs. model-based reinforcement learning (RL). Thisdual-systems theory posits independent valuation systems in controlling choices and may overlap with systems of bilingualexecutive control. Forty-five bilingual adults completed a two-stage decision making task with transition and probabilityof reward dynamically varying. First, we calculated a model-based index to measure how much participants integrateenvironmental structure with reward when planning choices. Consistent with monolingual results, we found that bilingualsdisplay model-free and model-based RL to differing degrees. Next, we assessed whether individual differences in secondlanguage (L2) age of acquisition (AoA) and language entropy interact with these RL systems. Bilinguals with earlierL2 AoA and greater language entropy demonstrated model-free RL, whereas bilinguals with later L2 AoA and lowerlanguage entropy demonstrated greater sensitivity to model-based reward frequencies. This suggests an interesting linkbetween bilingual experience and how reward shapes decision-making strategies.

Despite recent interest in pupillometry as a psychophysiological measure, it remains unclear what construct the physio-logical measure is assessing in cognitive control tasks: task load or mental exertion. This debate is of particular interestas cognitive effort remains an elusive construct partly due to the difficulty in empirically quantifying mental exertion.The current research aims to differentiate these disparate accounts by leveraging rewards as motivation for effort exertion.Using an individual differences approach, a sample of 80 undergraduate students performed a cognitive control taskTaskswitching. Critically, monetary incentives were used to motivate participants to exercise cognitive control, and found toimprove overall performance. Pupillary responses were found to increase in response to trials requiring more cognitivecontrol, and relate to performance improvements in the rewarded conditions. The present findings provide some supportfor the effort account, and suggest that pupillometry may be a viable index of cognitive effort.

While previous models of economic decision-making offer de-scriptive accounts of behavior, they often overlook the com-putational complexity of estimating expected utility. Here,we seek to understand how both environmental and individualconstraints on cognition shape our daily decision. Informedby the predictions of a recently-proposed resource-rationalprocess model of risky choice, sample-based expected utility(SbEU; Nobandegani, da Silva Castanheira, Otto, & Shultz,2018), we reveal that both time pressure and individual dif-ferences in processing speed have a convergent effect on riskpreferences during a risky decision-making task. Under severetime constraints, participants’ risk preferences manifested astrong framing effect compared to little time pressure in whichchoice adhered to the classic fourfold pattern of risk prefer-ences. Similarly, individual differences in processing speed,measured using an established task, predicted similar effectsupon risk attitudes as extrinsic time pressure. These findingsreveal a converging contribution of environmental and individ-ual limitations on risky choice, and provide empirical supportfor SbEU as a resource-rational process model of risky deci-sion making. Notably, SbEU serves as a single-process modelof two well-established biases, and the transition between thetwo, in risky choice.

While anticipated rewards have been shown to impart enhancements on memory performance, it remains unclear whetherthese benefits reflect improved encoding or more cautious decision-making. In two experiments, participants (N=47, each)encoded complex videos depicting everyday episodes and were tested for their memory of various details. Importantly,participants were informed that each video was associated with either high (25 cents) or low (1 cent) reward at eitherencoding or retrieval. We found participants were more accurate for questions relating to high reward videos only whenreward information was presented at encoding. Memory performance and response-times were modeled using a driftdiffusion model to assess the effects of reward on decision parameters. The drift rate was found to be significantly largerfor high reward videos when compared to low reward videos, only when reward was presented at encoding. These resultssuggest that reward at encoding enhances memory selectivity for detailed episodic information.

A body of work spanning neuroscience, economics, and psychology indicates that decision-making is context-dependent, which means that the value of an option depends not only on the option in question, but also on the other options in the choice set-or the 'context'. While context effects have been observed primarily in small-scale laboratory studies with tightly constrained, artificially constructed choice sets, it remains to be determined whether these context effects take hold in real-world choice problems, where choice sets are large and decisions driven by rich histories of direct experience. Here, we investigate whether valuations are context-dependent in real-world choice by analyzing a massive restaurant rating dataset as well as two independent replication datasets which provide complementary operationalizations of restaurant choice. We find that users make fewer ratings-maximizing choices in choice sets with higher-rated options-a hallmark of context-dependent choice-and that post-choice restaurant ratings also varied systematically with the ratings of unchosen restaurants. Furthermore, in a follow-up laboratory experiment using hypothetical choice sets matched to the real-world data, we find further support for the idea that subjective valuations of restaurants are scaled in accordance with the choice context, providing corroborating evidence for a general mechanistic-level account of these effects. Taken together, our results provide a potent demonstration of context-dependent choice in real-world choice settings, manifesting both in decisions and subjective valuation of options.