Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans seem to arbitrate between automatic and controlled processing by optimizing a trade-off between cognitive effort and performance. Previous research has described ways of how these costs and benefits can be quantified and how the trade-off between them can be performed. However, it remains unclear how the costs should be weighed relative to the benefits and how the cost of the arbitration mechanism itself factors in. Here, we derive measures for these separate factors from a single objective: the variational free energy. We demonstrate that by minimizing this objective, the trade-off between automatic and controlled processing as well as meta-control is optimized implicitly. As a proof of concept, we show that the congruency and proportion congruency effects in the Stroop task directly result from this optimization, given an environment with specific statistical regularities.