Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.