How can we apply decision-making theories to wild animal behavior? Predictions arising from dual process theory and Bayesian decision theory

Our understanding of decision-making processes and cognitive biases is ever increasing, thanks to an accumulation of testable models and a large body of research over the last several decades. The vast majority of this work has been done in humans and laboratory animals because these study subjects and situations allow for tightly controlled experiments. However, it raises questions about how this knowledge can be applied to wild animals in their complex environments. Here, we review two prominent decision-making theories, dual process theory and Bayesian decision theory, to assess the similarities in these approaches and consider how they may apply to wild animals living in heterogenous environments within complicated social groupings. In particular, we wanted to assess when wild animals are likely to respond to a situation with a quick heuristic decision and when they are likely to spend more time and energy on the decision-making process. Based on the literature and evidence from our multi-destination routing experiments on primates, we find that individuals are likely to make quick, heuristic decisions when they encounter routine situations, or signals/cues that accurately predict a certain outcome, or easy problems that experience or evolutionary history has prepared them for. Conversely, effortful decision-making is likely in novel or surprising situations, when signals and cues have unpredictable or uncertain relationships to an outcome, and when problems are computationally complex. Though if problems are overly complex, satisficing via heuristics is likely, to avoid costly mental effort. We present hypotheses for how animals with different socio-ecologies may have to distribute their cognitive effort. Finally, we examine the conservation implications and potential cognitive overload for animals experiencing increasingly novel situations caused by current human-induced rapid environmental change.

Mothers exhibit higher neural activity in gaining rewards for their children than for themselves

Are people willing to exert greater effort to obtain rewards for their children than they are for themselves? Although previous studies have demonstrated that social distance influences neural responses to altruistic reward processing, the distinction between winning rewards for oneself and winning them for one's child is unclear. In the present study, a group of 31 mothers performed a monetary incentive delay task in which cue-induced reward anticipations of winning a reward for themselves, their children and donation to a charity program were manipulated trial-wise, followed by performance-contingent feedback. Behaviorally, the anticipation of winning a reward for their children accelerated participants' responses. Importantly, the electroencephalogram results revealed that across the reward anticipation and consumption phases, the child condition elicited comparable or higher brain responses of participants than the self condition did. The source localization results showed that participants' reward anticipations for their children were associated with more activation in the social brain regions, compared to winning a reward for themselves or a charity donation. Overall, these findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms of altruistic reward processing and suggest that the priority of winning a reward for one's child may transcend the limits of the self-advantage effect in reward processing.

Pupillary correlates of preparatory control in the Stroop task

In three experiments, individual differences in preparatory control in the Stroop task were examined. Participants performed variants of the Stroop task while pupillary responses were examined during the preparatory interval. Variation in working memory capacity was also examined. High Stroop performers tended to demonstrate larger preparatory pupillary responses than low Stroop performers. In Experiment 2, when participants were given pre-cues indicating the congruency of the upcoming trial (MATCHING vs. CONFLICTING), high Stroop performers had larger preparatory pupillary responses for incongruent trials compared to congruent trials, whereas low Stroop performers demonstrated similar preparatory pupillary responses on both incongruent and congruent trials. These results suggest that variation in Stroop performance is partially due to individual differences in the ability to ramp up and regulate the intensity of attention allocated to preparatory control processes. Additionally, there was limited evidence that preparatory control processes partially account for the relation between working memory capacity and performance on the Stroop. Overall, these results provide evidence that individual differences in Stroop performance are partialy due to variation in preparatory control.

People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals

Beyond words and gestures, people have a remarkable capacity to communicate indirectly through everyday objects: A hat on a chair can mean it is occupied, rope hanging across an entrance can mean we should not cross, and objects placed in a closed box can imply they are not ours to take. How do people generate and interpret the communicative meaning of objects? We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by social goal inference, where observers recover what social goal explains an object being placed in a particular location. To test this idea, we study a category of common ad-hoc communicative objects where a small cost is used to signal avoidance. Using computational modeling, we first show that goal inference from indirect physical evidence can give rise to the ability to use object placement to communicate. We then show that people from the U.S. and the Tsimane'-a farming-foraging group native to the Bolivian Amazon-can infer the communicative meaning of object placement in the absence of a pre-existing convention, and that people's inferences are quantitatively predicted by our model. Finally, we show evidence that people can store and retrieve this meaning for use in subsequent encounters, revealing a potential mechanism for how ad-hoc communicative objects become quickly conventionalized. Our model helps shed light on how humans use their ability to interpret other people's behavior to embed social meaning into the physical world.

When the mind's eye prevails: The Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis

Throughout the 20th century, the psychological literature has considered attention as being primarily directed at the outside world. More recent theories conceive attention as also operating on internal information, and mounting evidence suggests a single, shared attentional focus between external and internal information. Such sharing implies a cognitive architecture where attention needs to be continuously shifted between prioritizing either external or internal information, but the fundamental principles underlying this attentional balancing act are currently unknown. Here, we propose and evaluate one such principle in the shape of the Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis: Contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, IDEA asserts that attention is inherently biased toward internal information. We provide a theoretical account for why such an internal attention bias may have evolved and examine findings from a wide range of literatures speaking to the balancing of external versus internal attention, including research on working memory, attention switching, visual search, mind wandering, sustained attention, and meditation. We argue that major findings in these disparate research lines can be coherently understood under IDEA. Finally, we consider tentative neurocognitive mechanisms contributing to IDEA and examine the practical implications of more deliberate control over this bias in the context of psychopathology. It is hoped that this novel hypothesis motivates cross-talk between the reviewed research lines and future empirical studies directly examining the mechanisms that steer attention either inward or outward on a moment-by-moment basis.

The Role of Subjective Expectations for Exhaustion and Recovery: The Sample Case of Work and Leisure

We propose a new model of exhaustion and recovery that posits that people evaluate an activity as exhausting or recovering on the basis of the subjective expectation about how exhausting or recovering activities related to a certain life domain are. To exemplify the model, we focus as a first step on the widely shared expectations that work is exhausting and leisure is recovering. We assume that the association of an activity related to a life domain associated with exhaustion (e.g., work) leads people to monitor their experiences and selectively attend to signs of exhaustion; in contrast, while pursuing an activity related to a life domain associated with recovery (e.g., leisure), people preferentially process signs of recovery. We further posit that the preferential processing of signs of exhaustion (vs. recovery) leads to experiencing more exhaustion when pursuing activities expected to be exhausting (e.g., work activities) and more recovery when pursuing activities expected to be recovering (e.g., leisure activities). This motivational process model of exhaustion and recovery provides new testable hypotheses that differ from predictions derived from limited-resource models.

Intention beyond desire: Spontaneous intentional commitment regulates conflicting desires

The human mind is a mosaic composed of multiple selves with conflicting desires. How can coherent actions emerge from such conflicts? Classical desire theory argues that rational action depends on maximizing the expected utilities evaluated by all desires. In contrast, intention theory suggests that humans regulate conflicting desires with an intentional commitment that constrains action planning towards a fixed goal. Here, we designed a series of 2D navigation games in which participants were instructed to navigate to two equally desirable destinations. We focused on the critical moments in navigation to test whether humans spontaneously commit to an intention and take actions that would be qualitatively different from those of a purely desire-driven agent. Across four experiments, we found three distinctive signatures of intentional commitment that only exist in human actions: "goal perseverance" as the persistent pursuit of an original intention despite unexpected drift making the intention suboptimal; "self-binding" as the proactive binding of oneself to a committed future by avoiding a path that could lead to many futures; and "temporal leap" as the commitment to a distant future even before reaching the proximal one. These results suggest that humans spontaneously form an intention with a committed plan to quarantine conflicting desires from actions, supporting intention as a distinctive mental state beyond desire. Additionally, our findings shed light on the possible functions of intention, such as reducing computational load and making one's actions more predictable in the eyes of a third-party observer.

Metacognitive Effort Regulation across Cultures

Success in cognitive tasks is associated with effort regulation and motivation. We employed the meta-reasoning approach to investigate metacognitive monitoring accuracy and effort regulation in problem solving across cultures. Adults from China, from Israel, and from Europe and North America (for simplicity: "Western countries") solved nonverbal problems and rated their confidence in their answers. The task involved identifying geometric shapes within silhouettes and, thus, required overcoming interference from holistic processing. The Western group displayed the worst monitoring accuracy, with both the highest overconfidence and poorest resolution (discrimination in confidence between the correct and wrong solutions). The Israeli group resembled the Western group in many respects but exhibited better monitoring accuracy. The Chinese group invested the most time and achieved the best success rates, demonstrating exceptional motivation and determination to succeed. However, their efficiency suffered as they correctly solved the fewest problems per minute of work. Effort regulation analysis based on the Diminishing Criterion Model revealed distinct patterns: the Western participants invested the least amount of time regardless of item difficulty and the Israelis invested more time only when addressing the hardest items. The Chinese group allocated more time throughout but particularly in moderate to difficult items, hinting at their strategic determination to overcome the challenge. Understanding cultural differences in metacognitive processes carries implications for theory (e.g., motivational factors) and practice (e.g., international teams, education). The present findings can serve as a foundation for future research in these and other domains.

The Computational Challenges of Means Selection Problems: Network Structure of Goal Systems Predicts Human Performance

We study human performance in two classical NP-hard optimization problems: Set Cover and Maximum Coverage. We suggest that Set Cover and Max Coverage are related to means selection problems that arise in human problem-solving and in pursuing multiple goals: The relationship between goals and means is expressed as a bipartite graph where edges between means and goals indicate which means can be used to achieve which goals. While these problems are believed to be computationally intractable in general, they become more tractable when the structure of the network resembles a tree. Thus, our main prediction is that people should perform better with goal systems that are more tree-like. We report three behavioral experiments which confirm this prediction. Our results suggest that combinatorial parameters that are instrumental to algorithm design can also be useful for understanding when and why people struggle to choose between multiple means to achieve multiple goals.

Evidence or Confidence: What Is Really Monitored during a Decision?

Assessing our confidence in the choices we make is important to making adaptive decisions, and it is thus no surprise that we excel in this ability. However, standard models of decision-making, such as the drift-diffusion model (DDM), treat confidence assessment as a post hoc or parallel process that does not directly influence the choice, which depends only on accumulated evidence. Here, we pursue the alternative hypothesis that what is monitored during a decision is an evolving sense of confidence (that the to-be-selected option is the best) rather than raw evidence. Monitoring confidence has the appealing consequence that the decision threshold corresponds to a desired level of confidence for the choice, and that confidence improvements can be traded off against the resources required to secure them. We show that most previous findings on perceptual and value-based decisions traditionally interpreted from an evidence-accumulation perspective can be explained more parsimoniously from our novel confidence-driven perspective. Furthermore, we show that our novel confidence-driven DDM (cDDM) naturally generalizes to decisions involving any number of alternative options - which is notoriously not the case with traditional DDM or related models. Finally, we discuss future empirical evidence that could be useful in adjudicating between these alternatives.

Social Rejection but Not Ostracism Increases Cognitive Effort Avoidance

Purpose

Social exclusion has been found to have a significant impact on cognitive control processing. However, the existing research on this topic has yielded inconsistent findings, possibly due to variations in the type of exclusion and individuals' cognitive effort. Two studies were conducted to explore the influence of social rejection and ostracism on cognitive effort avoidance.

Participants and Methods

Study 1 involved forty-six adults who were randomly divided into a rejection group and a control group using a get-acquainted paradigm. The demand selection task (DST) was used to measure cognitive effort avoidance. In Study 2, forty-eight adults were recruited, Cyberball and DST paradigms were used to evoke ostracism and test cognitive effort avoidance, respectively.

Results

The results of study 1 showed that individuals who were socially rejected by their partners exhibited impaired response accuracy of cognitive control and increased cognitive effort avoidance. This indicates that social rejection has a negative impact on cognitive control processing and that individuals may be more likely to avoid cognitive effort when experiencing social rejection. The results of study 2 showed that ostracism had an impact on both response speed and accuracy, but it did not significantly affect cognitive effort avoidance. This indicates that social rejection affects cognitive control processing differently than ostracism, and individuals are more likely to avoid cognitive effort when experiencing social rejection.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that social rejection and ostracism have different effects on cognitive effort, which may contribute to the inconsistent cognitive performance during social exclusion. Future research may explore the underlying mechanisms that lead to these differences and examine how individuals can mitigate the negative effects of social exclusion on cognitive control processing.

When a thinker does not want to think: Adding meta-control into the working model

De Neys proposes an elegant solution to several theoretical problems of the dual-process theories but underspecifies the role of motivation in initiating, intensifying, and ceasing deliberation. Therefore, I suggest including a meta-cognitive control component in the working model that can moderate deliberation, for instance by affecting the deliberation threshold.

Deliberation is (probably) triggered and sustained by multiple mechanisms

De Neys proposes that deliberation is triggered and sustained by uncertainty. I argue that there are cases where deliberation occurs with low uncertainty - such as when problems are excessively complicated and the reasoner decides against engaging in deliberation - and that there are likely multiple factors that lead to (or undermine) deliberation. Nonetheless, De Neys is correct to surface these issues.

Non-consciously processed physical activity for survival versus consciously deliberated exercise for health

Humans evolved to become dependent on physical activity for their survival, but they have not evolved to exercise today. Because survival in modern society is heavily reliant on conscious thinking, most people (54%) have evolved away from physical activity and become occasional exercisers. This transition from non-conscious to conscious processing prevents people from capitalizing on evolution's wisdom for survival and wellbeing as they consciously deliberate on the utility of health practices to achieve certain outcomes (e.g., weight loss). Unlike in early times, people today have a choice of not engaging in physical activity and yet surviving. As a result, they struggle with the question whether the gains from exercising are greater than losses from not doing it, weighing positive gains and losses against negative gains and losses. Such conscious deliberations, however, can easily be overridden by solving cognitive dissonance (e.g., "exercise is good for my health" vs. "I don't exercise") through conscious rationalizations and non-conscious dismissal. Today's exercise problem can only be solved by individually acquiring the mindset of early times of evolution when the initiation of physical activity was largely a matter of non-conscious thoughts and feelings.

Integrated control of non-motor and motor efforts during perceptual decision-making and action execution: a pilot study

Humans daily life is characterized by a succession of voluntary actions. Since energy resources are limited, the ability to invest the appropriate amount of effort for selecting and executing these actions is a hallmark of adapted behavior. Recent studies indicate that decisions and actions share important principles, including the optimization of their duration when the context requires it. In the present pilot study, we test the hypothesis that the management of effort-related energy resources is shared between decision and action too. Healthy human subjects performed a perceptual decision task where they had to choose between two levels of effort to invest in making the decision (i.e. two levels of perceptual difficulty), and report it with a reaching movement. Crucially, the movement accuracy requirement gradually increased from trial to trial depending on participants' decision performance. Results indicate an overall moderate and non-significant impact of the increasing motor difficulty on the choice of the non-motor (decision) effort to invest in each trial and on decision performance. By contrast, motor performance strongly decreased depending on both the motor and decisional difficulties. Together, the results support the hypothesis of an integrated management of the effort-related energy resources between decision and action. They also suggest that in the present task, the mutualized resources are primarily allocated to the decision-making process to the detriment of movements.

Cognitive effort and active inference

This paper aims to integrate some key constructs in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control and executive function by formalising the notion of cognitive (or mental) effort in terms of active inference. To do so, we call upon a task used in neuropsychology to assess impulse inhibition-a Stroop task. In this task, participants must suppress the impulse to read a colour word and instead report the colour of the text of the word. The Stroop task is characteristically effortful, and we unpack a theory of mental effort in which, to perform this task accurately, participants must overcome prior beliefs about how they would normally act. However, our interest here is not in overt action, but in covert (mental) action. Mental actions change our beliefs but have no (direct) effect on the outside world-much like deploying covert attention. This account of effort as mental action lets us generate multimodal (choice, reaction time, and electrophysiological) data of the sort we might expect from a human participant engaging in this task. We analyse how parameters determining cognitive effort influence simulated responses and demonstrate that-when provided only with performance data-these parameters can be recovered, provided they are within a certain range.

Worth the Effort: the Start and Stick to Desirable Difficulties (S2D2) Framework

Desirable difficulties are learning conditions that are often experienced as effortful, but have a positive effect on learning results and transfer of knowledge and skills (Bjork & Bjork, 2011; Bjork, 1994). Learners often do not appreciate the beneficial effects of desirable difficulties, and the negative experiences of high effort and perceived low learning make them resistant to engage in desirable difficulties (Biwer et al., 2020a). This ultimately limits learning outcomes and academic achievement. With the increasing emphasis on self-regulation in education, characterized by higher learner agency and abundant choices in what, when, and how to study, the field of educational psychology is in need of theoretical and empirically testable assumptions that improve self-regulation in desirably difficult learning conditions with the aim to foster self-regulation abilities, learning outcomes, and academic achievement. Here, we present a framework that describes how to support self-regulation of effort when engaging in desirable difficulties: the “Start and Stick to Desirable Difficulties (S2D2)” framework. The framework builds on the Effort Monitoring and Regulation model (de Bruin et al., 2020). The aim of this framework is (1) to describe evidence for the central role of perceived effort and perceived learning in (dis)engagement in desirable difficulties, and (2) to review evidence on, and provide an agenda for research to improve learners’ self-regulated use of desirable difficulties to help them start and persist when learning feels tough, but is actually effective.

Disturbed insular functional connectivity and its clinical implication in patients with complex regional pain syndrome

BACKGROUND

Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is characterized by continued amplification of pain intensity. Given the pivotal roles of the insula in the perception and interpretation of pain, we examined insular functional connectivity and its associations with clinical characteristics in patients with CRPS.

METHODS

Twenty-one patients with CRPS and 49 healthy controls underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. The seed-to-seed functional connectivity analysis was performed for the bilateral insulae and cognitive control regions including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) between the two groups. Correlations between altered functional connectivity and clinical characteristics were assessed in CRPS patients.

RESULTS

CRPS patients exhibited lower functional connectivity within the bilateral anterior insulae, between the insular and cognitive control regions (the bilateral anterior/posterior insulae-dACC; the right posterior insula-left DLPFC), as compared with healthy controls at false discovery rate-corrected p < 0.05. In CRPS patients, pain severity was associated negatively with the left-right anterior insular functional connectivity (r = -0.49, p = 0.03), yet positively with the left anterior insula-dACC functional connectivity (r = 0.51, p = 0.02).

CONCLUSIONS

CRPS patients showed lower functional connectivity both within the bilateral anterior insulae and between the insular and cognitive control regions. The current findings may suggest pivotal roles of the insula in dysfunctional pain processing of CRPS patients.

Neural correlates of changing food choices while bypassing values

Current theories suggest that altering choices requires value modification. To investigate this, normal-weight female participants' food choices and values were tested before and after an approach-avoidance training (AAT), while neural activity was recorded during the choice task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During AAT, participants consistently approached low- while avoiding high-calorie food cues. AAT facilitated low-calorie food choices, leaving food values unchanged. Instead, we observed a shift in indifference points, indicating the decreased contribution of food values in food choices. Training-induced choice shifts were associated with increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). In contrast, the medial PFC activity was not changed. Additionally, PCC grey matter density predicted individual differences in training-induced functional changes, suggesting anatomic predispositions to training impact. Our findings demonstrate neural mechanisms underlying choice modulation independent of valuation-related processes, with substantial theoretical significance for decision-making frameworks and translational implications for health-related decisions resilient to value shifts.

More than a feeling: physiological measures of affect index the integration of effort costs and rewards during anticipatory effort evaluation

The notion that humans avoid effortful action is one of the oldest and most persistent in psychology. Influential theories of effort propose that effort valuations are made according to a cost-benefit trade-off: we tend to invest mental effort only when the benefits outweigh the costs. While these models provide a useful conceptual framework, the affective components of effort valuation remain poorly understood. Here, we examined whether primitive components of affective response-positive and negative valence, captured via facial electromyography (fEMG)-can be used to better understand valuations of cognitive effort. Using an effortful arithmetic task, we find that fEMG activity in the corrugator supercilii-thought to index negative valence-1) tracks the anticipation and exertion of cognitive effort and 2) is attenuated in the presence of high rewards. Together, these results suggest that activity in the corrugator reflects the integration of effort costs and rewards during effortful decision-making.

Pushing the Bounds of Bounded Optimality and Rationality

All forms of cognition, whether natural or artificial, are subject to constraints of their computing architecture. This assumption forms the tenet of virtually all general theories of cognition, including those deriving from bounded optimality and bounded rationality. In this letter, we highlight an unresolved puzzle related to this premise: what are these constraints, and why are cognitive architectures subject to cognitive constraints in the first place? First, we lay out some pieces along the puzzle edge, such as computational tradeoffs inherent to neural architectures that give rise to rational bounds of cognition. We then outline critical next steps for characterizing cognitive bounds, proposing that some of these bounds can be subject to modification by cognition and, as such, are part of what is being optimized when cognitive agents decide how to allocate cognitive resources. We conclude that these emerging views may contribute to a more holistic perspective on the nature of cognitive bounds, as well as their alteration subject to cognition.

Is all mental effort equal? The role of cognitive demand-type on effort avoidance

Humans are often termed "cognitive misers" for their aversion to mental effort. Both in and outside the laboratory people often show preferences for low-effort tasks and are willing to forgo financial reward to avoid more demanding alternatives. Mental effort, however, does not seem to be ubiquitously avoided: people play crosswords, board games, and read novels, all as forms of leisure. While such activities undoubtedly require effort, the type of cognitive demands they impose appear markedly different from the tasks typically used in psychological research on mental effort (e.g., N-Back, Stroop Task, vigilance tasks). We investigate the effect disparate demands, such as tasks which require problem solving (e.g., solve the missing number: 1, 3, 7, 15, 31,?) compared to those which require rule-implementation (e.g., N-Back task), have on people's aversion to or preference for increased mental effort. Across four experiments using three different tasks, and a mixture of online and lab-based settings, we find that aversion to effort remains largely stable regardless of the types of cognitive demands a task imposes. The results are discussed in terms of other factors that might induce the pursuit of mental effort over and above the type of cognitive demands imposed by a task.

Learning progress mediates the link between cognitive effort and task engagement

While a substantial body of work has shown that cognitive effort is aversive and costly, a separate line of research on intrinsic motivation suggests that people spontaneously seek challenging tasks. According to one prominent account of intrinsic motivation, the learning progress motivation hypothesis, the preference for difficult tasks reflects the dynamic range that these tasks yield for changes in task performance (Kaplan & Oudeyer, 2007). Here we test this hypothesis, by asking whether greater engagement with intermediately difficult tasks, indexed by subjective ratings and objective pupil measurements, is a function of trial-wise changes in performance. In a novel paradigm, we determined each individual's capacity for task performance and used difficulty levels that are low, intermediately challenging or high for that individual. We demonstrated that challenging tasks resulted in greater liking and engagement scores compared with easy tasks. Pupil size tracked objective task difficulty, where challenging tasks were associated with greater pupil responses than easy tasks. Most importantly, pupil responses were predicted by trial-to-trial changes in average accuracy as well as learning progress (derivative of average accuracy), while greater pupil responses also predicted greater subjective engagement scores. Together, these results substantiate the learning progress motivation hypothesis stating that the link between task engagement and cognitive effort is mediated the dynamic range for changes in task performance.

The Effects of the Inhalant Toluene on Cognitive Function and Behavioral Flexibility: A Review of Recent Findings

Substance use disorder (SUD) is characterized, in part, by lack of control over drug seeking and taking. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is highly involved in control of behavior and deficits in PFC structure and function have been demonstrated in clinical and preclinical studies of SUD. Of the various classes of drugs associated with the development of SUD, inhalants are among the least studied despite their widespread use among adolescents and children. In this work, we review what is currently known regarding the sites and mechanisms of action of inhalants with a focus on the volatile solvent toluene that is contained in a wide variety of legal and easily obtained products. We then describe how inhalants including toluene affect various behaviors with an emphasis on those associated with PFC function and how chronic use of inhalants alters brain structure and neuronal signaling. Findings from these studies highlight advances made in recent years that have expanded our understanding of the effects of inhalants on brain structure and reinforce the need for continued work in this field.

Conscious cognitive effort in cognitive control

Cognitive effort is thought to be familiar in everyday life, ubiquitous across multiple variations of task and circumstance, and integral to cost/benefit computations that are themselves central to the proper functioning of cognitive control. In particular, cognitive effort is thought to be closely related to the assessment of cognitive control's costs. I argue here that the construct of cognitive effort, as it is deployed in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is problematically unclear. The result is that talk of cognitive effort may paper over significant disagreement regarding the nature of cognitive effort, and its key functions for cognitive control. I highlight key points of disagreement, and several open questions regarding what causes cognitive effort, what cognitive effort represents, cognitive effort's relationship to action, and cognitive effort's relationship to consciousness. I also suggest that pluralism about cognitive effort-that cognitive effort may manifest as a range of intentional or non-intentional actions the function of which is to promote greater success at paradigmatic cognitive control tasks-may be a fruitful and irenic way to conceive of cognitive effort. Finally, I suggest that recent trends in work on cognitive control suggests that we might fruitfully conceive of cognitive effort as one key node in a complex network of mental value, and that studying this complex network may illuminate the nature of cognitive control, and the role of consciousness in cognitive control's proper functioning. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Consciousness Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Neuroscience > Cognition.

Neural signatures of task-related fluctuations in auditory attention and age-related changes

Listening in everyday life requires attention to be deployed dynamically - when listening is expected to be difficult and when relevant information is expected to occur - to conserve mental resources. Conserving mental resources may be particularly important for older adults who often experience difficulties understanding speech. In the current study, we use electro- and magnetoencephalography to investigate the neural and behavioral mechanics of attention regulation during listening and the effects that aging has on these. We first show in younger adults (17-31 years) that neural alpha oscillatory activity indicates when in time attention is deployed (Experiment 1) and that deployment depends on listening difficulty (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 investigated age-related changes in auditory attention regulation. Middle-aged and older adults (54-72 years) show successful attention regulation but appear to utilize timing information differently compared to younger adults (20-33 years). We show a notable age-group dissociation in recruited brain regions. In younger adults, superior parietal cortex underlies alpha power during attention regulation, whereas, in middle-aged and older adults, alpha power emerges from more ventro-lateral areas (posterior temporal cortex). This difference in the sources of alpha activity between age groups only occurred during task performance and was absent during rest (Experiment S1). In sum, our study suggests that middle-aged and older adults employ different neural control strategies compared to younger adults to regulate attention in time under listening challenges.

Executive Control of Sequence Behavior in Pigeons Involves Two Distinct Brain Regions

Executive functions arise from multiple regions of the brain acting in concert. To facilitate such cross-regional computations, the brain is organized into distinct executive networks, like the frontoparietal network. Despite similar cognitive abilities across many domains, little is known about such executive networks in birds. Recent advances in avian fMRI have shown a possible subset of regions, including the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) and the lateral part of medial intermediate nidopallium (NIML), that may contribute to complex cognition, forming an action control system of pigeons. We investigated the neuronal activity of NCL and NIML. Single-cell recordings were obtained during the execution of a complex sequential motor task that required executive control to stop executing one behavior and continue with a different one. We compared the neuronal activity of NIML to NCL and found that both regions fully processed the ongoing sequential execution of the task. Differences arose from how behavioral outcome was processed. Our results indicate that NCL takes on a role in evaluating outcome, while NIML is more tightly associated with ongoing sequential steps. Importantly, both regions seem to contribute to overall behavioral output as parts of a possible avian executive network, crucial for behavioral flexibility and decision-making.

Learning when effort matters: neural dynamics underlying updating and adaptation to changes in performance efficacy

To determine how much cognitive control to invest in a task, people need to consider whether exerting control matters for obtaining rewards. In particular, they need to account for the efficacy of their performance-the degree to which rewards are determined by performance or by independent factors. Yet it remains unclear how people learn about their performance efficacy in an environment. Here we combined computational modeling with measures of task performance and EEG, to provide a mechanistic account of how people (i) learn and update efficacy expectations in a changing environment and (ii) proactively adjust control allocation based on current efficacy expectations. Across 2 studies, subjects performed an incentivized cognitive control task while their performance efficacy (the likelihood that rewards are performance-contingent or random) varied over time. We show that people update their efficacy beliefs based on prediction errors-leveraging similar neural and computational substrates as those that underpin reward learning-and adjust how much control they allocate according to these beliefs. Using computational modeling, we show that these control adjustments reflect changes in information processing, rather than the speed-accuracy tradeoff. These findings demonstrate the neurocomputational mechanism through which people learn how worthwhile their cognitive control is.

Measuring cognitive effort without difficulty

An important finding in the cognitive effort literature has been that sensitivity to the costs of effort varies between individuals, suggesting that some people find effort more aversive than others. It has been suggested this may explain individual differences in other aspects of cognition; in particular that greater effort sensitivity may underlie some of the symptoms of conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. In this paper, we highlight a major problem with existing measures of cognitive effort that hampers this line of research, specifically the confounding of effort and difficulty. This means that behaviour thought to reveal effort costs could equally be explained by cognitive capacity, which influences the frequency of success and thereby the chance of obtaining reward. To address this shortcoming, we introduce a new test, the Number Switching Task (NST), specially designed such that difficulty will be unaffected by the effort manipulation and can easily be standardised across participants. In a large, online sample, we show that these criteria are met successfully and reproduce classic effort discounting results with the NST. We also demonstrate the use of Bayesian modelling with this task, producing behavioural parameters which can be associated with other measures, and report a preliminary association with the Need for Cognition scale.

How Reliable and Valid are Dual-Task Cost Metrics? A Meta-analysis of Locomotor-Cognitive Dual-Task Paradigms

OBJECTIVE

To assess the retest reliability, predictive validity, and concurrent validity of locomotor and cognitive dual-task cost (DTC) metrics derived from locomotor-cognitive dual-task paradigms.

DATA SOURCES

A literature search of electronic databases (PubMed, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Scopus) was conducted on May 29th, 2021, without time restriction.

STUDY SELECTION

For 1559 search results, titles and abstracts were screened by a single reviewer and full text of potentially eligible papers was considered by 2 independent reviewers. 25 studies that evaluated retest reliability, predictive validity, and concurrent validity of locomotor-cognitive DTC in healthy and clinical groups met inclusion criteria.

DATA EXTRACTION

Study quality was assessed using the Consensus-Based Standards for the Selection of Health Measurement Instrument checklist. Data relating to the retest reliability, predictive validity, and concurrent validity of DTC were extracted.

DATA SYNTHESIS

Meta-analysis showed that locomotor DTC metrics (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC]=0.61, 95% confidence interval [CI; 0.53.0.70]) had better retest reliability than cognitive DTC metrics (ICC=0.27, 95% CI [0.17.0.36]). Larger retest reliability estimates were found for temporal gait outcomes (ICC=0.67-0.72) compared with spatial (ICC=0.34-0.53). Motor DTC metrics showed weak predictive validity for the incidence of future falls (r=0.14, 95% CI [-0.03.0.31]). Motor DTC metrics had weak concurrent validity with other clinical and performance assessments (r=0.11, 95% CI [0.07.0.16]), as did cognitive DTC metrics (r=0.19, 95% CI [0.08.0.30]).

CONCLUSIONS

Gait-related temporal DTC metrics achieve adequate retest reliability, while predictive and concurrent validity of DTC needs to be improved before being used widely in clinical practice and other applied settings. Future research should ensure the reliability and validity of DTC outcomes before being used to assess dual-task interference.

Cognition: A Study in Mental Economy

In this letter, we argue that an economic perspective on the mind has played-and should continue to play-a central role in the development of cognitive science. Viewing cognition as the productive application of mental resources puts cognitive science and economics on a common conceptual footing, paving the way for closer collaboration between the two disciplines. This will enable cognitive scientists to more readily repurpose economic concepts and analytical tools for the study of mental phenomena, while at the same time, enriching our understanding of the modern economy, which is increasingly driven by mental, rather than physical, production.

Neuroergonomics on the Go: An Evaluation of the Potential of Mobile EEG for Workplace Assessment and Design

OBJECTIVE

We demonstrate and discuss the use of mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) for neuroergonomics. Both technical state of the art as well as measures and cognitive concepts are systematically addressed.

BACKGROUND

Modern work is increasingly characterized by information processing. Therefore, the examination of mental states, mental load, or cognitive processing during work is becoming increasingly important for ergonomics.

RESULTS

Mobile EEG allows to measure mental states and processes under real live conditions. It can be used for various research questions in cognitive neuroergonomics. Besides measures in the frequency domain that have a long tradition in the investigation of mental fatigue, task load, and task engagement, new approaches-like blink-evoked potentials-render event-related analyses of the EEG possible also during unrestricted behavior.

CONCLUSION

Mobile EEG has become a valuable tool for evaluating mental states and mental processes on a highly objective level during work. The main advantage of this technique is that working environments don't have to be changed while systematically measuring brain functions at work. Moreover, the workflow is unaffected by such neuroergonomic approaches.

Active causal structure learning in continuous time

Research on causal cognition has largely focused on learning and reasoning about contingency data aggregated across discrete observations or experiments. However, this setting represents only the tip of the causal cognition iceberg. A more general problem lurking beneath is that of learning the latent causal structure that connects events and actions as they unfold in continuous time. In this paper, we examine how people actively learn about causal structure in a continuous-time setting, focusing on when and where they intervene and how this shapes their learning. Across two experiments, we find that participants' accuracy depends on both the informativeness and evidential complexity of the data they generate. Moreover, participants' intervention choices strike a balance between maximizing expected information and minimizing inferential complexity. People time and target their interventions to create simple yet informative causal dynamics. We discuss how the continuous-time setting challenges existing computational accounts of active causal learning, and argue that metacognitive awareness of one's inferential limitations plays a critical role for successful learning in the wild.

Humans trade off search costs and accuracy in a combined visual search and perceptual task

To interact with one's environment, relevant objects have to be selected as targets for saccadic eye movements. Previous studies have demonstrated that factors such as visual saliency and reward influence saccade target selection, and that humans can dynamically trade off these factors to maximize expected value during visual search. However, expected value in everyday situations not only depends on saliency and reward, but also on the required time to find objects, and the likelihood of a successful object-interaction after search. Here we studied whether search costs and the accuracy to discriminate an object feature can be traded off to maximize expected value. We designed a combined visual search and perceptual discrimination task, where participants chose whether to search for an easy- or difficult-to-discriminate target in search displays populated by distractors that shared features with either the easy or the difficult target. Participants received a monetary reward for correct discriminations and were given limited time to complete as many trials as they could. We found that participants considered their discrimination performance and the search costs when choosing targets and, by this, maximized expected value. However, the accumulated reward was constrained by noise in both the choice of which target to search for, and which elements to fixate during search. We conclude that humans take into account the prospective search time and the likelihood of successful a object-interaction, when deciding what to search for. However, search performance is constrained by noise in decisions about what to search for and how to search for it.

The unintended detrimental effects of pursuing a professional vocation: The case of veterinarians

Pursuing one's life calling can be personally fulfilling and professionally rewarding, but it also requires sacrifice. We provide evidence of a strong vocational drive using veterinary students as a case study and find that they willingly contribute higher monetary donations for helping animals relative to students in other fields. We also find a significant reduction in the cognitive performance of veterinarian students when exposed to an animal-in-need manipulation. The performance of non-veterinary students in the cognitive task is unaffected by the manipulation. Our results highlight the need for programs to address the economic, financial, and mental health well-being of students and professionals to promote sustainable vocational career commitment. "You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at." W.H. Auden.

Fatigue and Human Performance: An Updated Framework

Fatigue has been defined differently in the literature depending on the field of research. The inconsistent use of the term fatigue complicated scientific communication, thereby limiting progress towards a more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. Therefore, Enoka and Duchateau (Med Sci Sports Exerc 48:2228-38, 2016, [3]) proposed a fatigue framework that distinguishes between trait fatigue (i.e., fatigue experienced by an individual over a longer period of time) and motor or cognitive task-induced state fatigue (i.e., self-reported disabling symptom derived from the two interdependent attributes performance fatigability and perceived fatigability). Thereby, performance fatigability describes a decrease in an objective performance measure, while perceived fatigability refers to the sensations that regulate the integrity of the performer. Although this framework served as a good starting point to unravel the psychophysiology of fatigue, several important aspects were not included and the interdependence of the mechanisms driving performance fatigability and perceived fatigability were not comprehensively discussed. Therefore, the present narrative review aimed to (1) update the fatigue framework suggested by Enoka and Duchateau (Med Sci Sports Exerc 48:2228-38, 2016, [3]) pertaining the taxonomy (i.e., cognitive performance fatigue and perceived cognitive fatigue were added) and important determinants that were not considered previously (e.g., effort perception, affective valence, self-regulation), (2) discuss the mechanisms underlying performance fatigue and perceived fatigue in response to motor and cognitive tasks as well as their interdependence, and (3) provide recommendations for future research on these interactions. We propose to define motor or cognitive task-induced state fatigue as a psychophysiological condition characterized by a decrease in motor or cognitive performance (i.e., motor or cognitive performance fatigue, respectively) and/or an increased perception of fatigue (i.e., perceived motor or cognitive fatigue). These dimensions are interdependent, hinge on different determinants, and depend on body homeostasis (e.g., wakefulness, core temperature) as well as several modulating factors (e.g., age, sex, diseases, characteristics of the motor or cognitive task). Consequently, there is no single factor primarily determining performance fatigue and perceived fatigue in response to motor or cognitive tasks. Instead, the relative weight of each determinant and their interaction are modulated by several factors.

Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of 'Intention Offloading'

How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory. However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically placed objects, and technologies such as smartphone alerts. This is known as 'intention offloading'. Despite the progress in our understanding of brain-based prospective memory, we know much less about the role of intention offloading in individuals' ability to fulfil delayed intentions. Here, we review recent research into intention offloading, with a particular focus on how individuals decide between storing intentions in internal memory versus external reminders. We also review studies investigating how intention offloading changes across the lifespan and how it relates to underlying brain mechanisms. We conclude that intention offloading is highly effective, experimentally tractable, and guided by metacognitive processes. Individuals have systematic biases in their offloading strategies that are stable over time. Evidence also suggests that individual differences and developmental changes in offloading strategies are driven at least in part by metacognitive processes. Therefore, metacognitive interventions could play an important role in promoting individuals' adaptive use of cognitive tools.

Strategically managing learning during perceptual decision making

Making optimal decisions in the face of noise requires balancing short-term speed and accuracy. But a theory of optimality should account for the fact that short-term speed can influence long-term accuracy through learning. Here, we demonstrate that long-term learning is an important dynamical dimension of the speed-accuracy trade-off. We study learning trajectories in rats and formally characterize these dynamics in a theory expressed as both a recurrent neural network and an analytical extension of the drift-diffusion model that learns over time. The model reveals that choosing suboptimal response times to learn faster sacrifices immediate reward, but can lead to greater total reward. We empirically verify predictions of the theory, including a relationship between stimulus exposure and learning speed, and a modulation of reaction time by future learning prospects. We find that rats' strategies approximately maximize total reward over the full learning epoch, suggesting cognitive control over the learning process.

Emotions as computations

Emotions ubiquitously impact action, learning, and perception, yet their essence and role remain widely debated. Computational accounts of emotion aspire to answer these questions with greater conceptual precision informed by normative principles and neurobiological data. We examine recent progress in this regard and find that emotions may implement three classes of computations, which serve to evaluate states, actions, and uncertain prospects. For each of these, we use the formalism of reinforcement learning to offer a new formulation that better accounts for existing evidence. We then consider how these distinct computations may map onto distinct emotions and moods. Integrating extensive research on the causes and consequences of different emotions suggests a parsimonious one-to-one mapping, according to which emotions are integral to how we evaluate outcomes (pleasure & pain), learn to predict them (happiness & sadness), use them to inform our (frustration & content) and others' (anger & gratitude) actions, and plan in order to realize (desire & hope) or avoid (fear & anxiety) uncertain outcomes.

Putting Effort into Emotion Regulation: Manipulating Desirability and Motivational Strength

Although people often want to regulate their emotions, they are sometimes reluctant to invest the necessary effort in doing so. We propose that people could be motivated to invest effort in emotion regulation, by rendering the target emotional state more desirable. Rendering an emotion goal more desirable can motivate people to invest effort in emotion regulation, ultimately facilitating successful emotion regulation. In three studies (N = 452), we show that both inside and outside the lab, rendering calmness more desirable, boosted the motivational strength to increase calmness, increasing the effort people invested to increase calmness, and ultimately made people calmer. This investigation points to the importance of motivational strength as a potential means to promote effort and success in emotion regulation.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00155-0.

Humans adaptively resolve the explore-exploit dilemma under cognitive constraints: Evidence from a multi-armed bandit task

When navigating uncertain worlds, humans must balance exploring new options versus exploiting known rewards. Longer horizons and spatially structured option values encourage humans to explore, but the impact of real-world cognitive constraints such as environment size and memory demands on explore-exploit decisions is unclear. In the present study, humans chose between options varying in uncertainty during a multi-armed bandit task with varying environment size and memory demands. Regression and cognitive computational models of choice behavior showed that with a lower cognitive load, humans are more exploratory than a simulated value-maximizing learner, but under cognitive constraints, they adaptively scale down exploration to maintain exploitation. Thus, while humans are curious, cognitive constraints force people to decrease their strategic exploration in a resource-rational-like manner to focus on harvesting known rewards.

Preferences for seeking effort or reward information bias the willingness to work

Research suggests that the temporal order in which people receive information about costs and benefits whilst making decisions can influence their choices. But, do people have a preference for seeking information about costs or benefits when making effort-based decisions, and does this impact motivation? Here, participants made choices about whether to exert different levels of physical effort to obtain different magnitudes of reward, or rest for low reward. Prior to each effort-based choice, they also had to decide which information they wanted to see first: how much physical effort would be required, or how large the reward would be. We found no overall preference for seeking reward or effort information first, but motivation did change when people saw reward or effort information first. Seeking effort information first, both someone's average tendency to do so and their choice to see effort first on a given trial, was associated with reductions in the willingness to exert higher effort. Moreover, the tendency to prefer effort information first was associated with reduced vigorous exercise and higher levels of fatigue in everyday life. These findings highlight that preferences for seeking effort information may be a bias that reduces people's willingness to exert effort in the lab and in everyday life.

The "Effort Elephant" in the Room: What Is Effort, Anyway?

Despite decades of research in the fields of judgment and decision-making, social psychology, cognitive psychology, human-machine interaction, behavioral economics, and neuroscience, we still do not know what "cognitive effort" is. The definitions in use are often imprecise and sometimes diametrically opposed. Researchers with different assumptions talk past each other, and many aspects of effort conservation remain untested and difficult to measure. In this article, we explain why effort is so difficult to pin down and why it is important that researchers develop consensus on precise definitions. Next, we describe major "hidden" sources of miscommunication: areas in which researchers disagree in their underlying assumptions about the nature of effort without realizing it. We briefly review a number of methods used to both measure and manipulate the effortfulness of thinking and highlight why they often produce contradictory findings. We conclude by reviewing existing perspectives on cognitive effort and integrating them to suggest a common framework for communicating about effort as a limited cognitive resource.

Who Is Satisfied With Effort?

Abstract. The effort required to obtain certain rewards may influence the level of satisfaction with the following reward. Since people differ in beliefs about the availability of willpower resources required to pursue effortful actions, we investigated how willpower beliefs affect the perception of effort and satisfaction with reward. We hypothesized that people with limited willpower beliefs (i.e., believing that exerting effort leads to depletion of their inner resources) will perceive cognitive tasks as more effortful and will be less satisfied with the subsequent reward than those with non-limited beliefs (i.e., believing that exerting effort is invigorating rather than depleting). We tested this hypothesis by manipulating effort with different difficulty levels of the N-back task and measuring participants’ perception of effort expenditure and subjective satisfaction with a reward depending on their willpower beliefs. In accordance with the predictions, we found that those with limited willpower beliefs perceived the task as more effortful than those with non-limited willpower beliefs. Furthermore, when asked to subjectively rate their satisfaction with the reward gained for the task, limited believers rated their satisfaction lower than non-limited believers. These findings suggest that people take their willpower capacities into effort-satisfaction calculations. Results are discussed within the context of other models of effort, and practical implications of the findings are suggested.

Single-session anodal transcranial direct current stimulation to enhance sport-specific performance in athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a promising and feasible method to improve motor performance in healthy and clinical populations. However, the potential of tDCS to enhance sport-specific motor performance in athletes remains elusive.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed at analyzing the acute effects of a single anodal tDCS session on sport-specific motor performance changes in athletes compared to sham.

METHODS

A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed, Web of Science, and SPORTDiscus. The meta-analysis was performed using an inverse variance method and a random-effects model. Additionally, two subgroup analyses were conducted (1) depending on the stimulated brain areas (primary motor cortex (M1), temporal cortex (TC), prefrontal cortex (PFC), cerebellum (CB)), and (2) studies clustered in subgroups according to different sports performance domains (endurance, strength, visuomotor skill).

RESULTS

A total number of 19 studies enrolling a sample size of 258 athletes were deemed eligible for inclusion. Across all included studies, a significant moderate standardized mean difference (SMD) favoring anodal tDCS to enhance sport-specific motor performance could be observed. Subgroup analysis depending on cortical target areas of tDCS indicated a significant moderate SMD in favor of anodal tDCS compared to sham for M1 stimulation.

CONCLUSION

A single anodal tDCS session can lead to performance enhancement in athletes in sport-specific motor tasks. Although no definitive conclusions can be drawn regarding the modes of action as a function of performance domain or stimulation site, these results imply intriguing possibilities concerning sports performance enhancement through anodal M1 stimulation.

Vigilance, arousal, and acetylcholine: Optimal control of attention in a simple detection task

Paying attention to particular aspects of the world or being more vigilant in general can be interpreted as forms of ‘internal’ action. Such arousal-related choices come with the benefit of increasing the quality and situational appropriateness of information acquisition and processing, but incur potentially expensive energetic and opportunity costs. One implementational route for these choices is widespread ascending neuromodulation, including by acetylcholine (ACh). The key computational question that elective attention poses for sensory processing is when it is worthwhile paying these costs, and this includes consideration of whether sufficient information has yet been collected to justify the higher signal-to-noise ratio afforded by greater attention and, particularly if a change in attentional state is more expensive than its maintenance, when states of heightened attention ought to persist. We offer a partially observable Markov decision-process treatment of optional attention in a detection task, and use it to provide a qualitative model of the results of studies using modern techniques to measure and manipulate ACh in rodents performing a similar task.

Paying attention to a stimulus is costly, both in terms of energy and the lost opportunity to pay attention to something else. It is also beneficial, providing more information about its target. Thus, whether and when we pay more or less attention may best be considered as a choice of internal action that responds to this trade-off. Furthermore, measurements and manipulation of the neuromodulator acetylcholine have suggested that it is one of the instruments of attention, providing us with a window onto this choice. Here, we build an abstract model of a task in which an animal must look out for a brief visual stimulus that may or may not occur on each trial. We show that optimal attentional choices in the model depend on many factors, including how likely a signal is to occur across time, the balance between the improvement in information possible by paying greater attention and its increased cost, and whether there are also costs associated with switching between different attentional states. We also show that our model can qualitatively match results from experiments involving acetylcholine.

Distraction from pain depends on task demands and motivation

Supplemental Digital Content is Available in the Text.

Distraction is effective at reducing pain when the task is both cognitively demanding and there is sufficient motivation to invest effort into the task.

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Toward biophysical markers of depression vulnerability

A major difficulty with treating psychiatric disorders is their heterogeneity: different neural causes can lead to the same phenotype. To address this, we propose describing the underlying pathophysiology in terms of interpretable, biophysical parameters of a neural model derived from the electroencephalogram. We analyzed data from a small patient cohort of patients with depression and controls. Using DCM, we constructed biophysical models that describe neural dynamics in a cortical network activated during a task that is used to assess depression state. We show that biophysical model parameters are biomarkers, that is, variables that allow subtyping of depression at a biological level. They yield a low dimensional, interpretable feature space that allowed description of differences between individual patients with depressive symptoms. They could capture internal heterogeneity/variance of depression state and achieve significantly better classification than commonly used EEG features. Our work is a proof of concept that a combination of biophysical models and machine learning may outperform earlier approaches based on classical statistics and raw brain data.

Effortful Listening Despite Correct Responses: The Cost of Mental Repair in Sentence Recognition by Listeners With Cochlear Implants

PURPOSE

Speech recognition percent correct scores fail to capture the effort of mentally repairing the perception of speech that was initially misheard. This study measured the effort of listening to stimuli specifically designed to elicit mental repair in adults who use cochlear implants (CIs).

METHOD

CI listeners heard and repeated sentences in which specific words were distorted or masked by noise but recovered based on later context: a signature of mental repair. Changes in pupil dilation were tracked as an index of effort and time-locked with specific landmarks during perception.

RESULTS

Effort significantly increases when a listener needs to repair a misperceived word, even if the verbal response is ultimately correct. Mental repair of words in a sentence was accompanied by greater prevalence of errors elsewhere in the same sentence, suggesting that effort spreads to consume resources across time. The cost of mental repair in CI listeners was essentially the same as that observed in listeners with normal hearing in previous work.

CONCLUSIONS

Listening effort as tracked by pupil dilation is better explained by the mental repair and reconstruction of words rather than the appearance of correct or incorrect perception. Linguistic coherence drives effort more heavily than the mere presence of mistakes, highlighting the importance of testing materials that do not constrain coherence by design.