Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our understanding of effort perception is limited. Performance (e.g., response time; accuracy) is typically used as one wayto assess effort in cognitive tasks; however, performance can be readily dissociated from subjective ratings of effort. Onepotential contribution to effort ratings that could lead to such dissociations is the judgment context. We tested this notionusing a recently reported dissociation between performance and subjective effort in combination with a manipulation ofevaluation mode (i.e., joint versus separate evaluation). Participants were asked to silently read a display of words asquickly as possible, then provide the level of effort experienced. Results demonstrate that evaluation mode can have amarked effect on retrospective judgments of effort. Implications are discussed.