Van Kessel K, Ashburner M, Risko EF. Dissociations between data-driven and goal-driven effort reports: Performance, metacognition, and affect.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 2024;
77:983-993. [PMID:
37519122 PMCID:
PMC11032630 DOI:
10.1177/17470218231186609]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/19/2022] [Revised: 06/08/2023] [Accepted: 06/16/2023] [Indexed: 08/01/2023]
Abstract
Measuring effort has long been a challenge and this seems particularly true in the case of subjective effort. Koriat et al. compared two types of effort frames, what they call data-driven effort, the amount of effort perceived to be required by a task, and goal-driven effort, the amount of effort one chooses to invest in a task. This study investigates whether self-reports of data- and goal-driven effort are differentially associated with test performance, metacognition, and affect in a complex learning task. Results demonstrate that data- and goal-driven effort have qualitatively different relations with many of these variables. For example, partial correlations revealed data-driven effort was negatively associated with prospective and retrospective performance estimates, but the opposite pattern emerged for goal-driven effort. These results demonstrate that how subjective measures of effort are framed (and interpreted by the respondent) can drastically influence how they relate to other variables of interest.
Collapse