Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evidence suggests exerting cognitive control carries an intrinsic cost and that individual differences in subjective costs mayaccount for differences in everyday control allocation. We developed two novel methods for quantifying an individualssubjective control cost and examined their relationship. We modified a standard patch foraging task so that subjects(N=18) had to complete a control-demanding task (N-Back) to travel between patches. We predicted subjects would acceptdiminishing rewards in a patch to avoid control demands, and used the Marginal Value Theorem to quantify the amount ofreward forfeited. In a second task, we estimated how many word-reading Stroop trials subjects would complete to avoid a(control-demanding) color-naming trial. We found that most subjects treated control as costly (i.e., made demand-avoidantchoices) in both tasks, and that there was a significant positive correlation between the estimated costs across tasks withina subject.