Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The propensity for people to avoid mentally demanding tasks in the absence of reward is well documented. As a result, humans are often described as cognitive misers. This characterisation, while consistent with the psychological literature, contradicts everyday instances of effort being sought: reading, board games, and brain-teasing puzzles. Such examples however are markedly different from the types of tasks typically used in the mental effort literature (e.g., working memory tasks, demand selection tasks). The current set of experiments assessed whether the type of task (i.e., N-Back, Number Sequence Problems [NSP], or Anagrams) affects people’s aversion to, or desire for, increased effort. On average, across 3 experiments, participants showed an aversion to effort regardless of whether the effort required was more attentional (N-Back) or cognitive (NSP and anagrams) in nature, and were willing to forgo financial reward in order to avoid more difficult tasks. A minority of participants, however, sought more effortful tasks for equal or lesser reward.