Colloquium dr. Ross Otto (McGill University)

Abstract

As our ability to perform mental tasks is constrained by our limited mental resources, we tend to minimize our use of cognitively "effortful" processing whenever we can. Recent theories posit that decisions to expend effort involve a cost–benefit tradeoff, in which people weigh the potential benefits of effort (e.g., a reward that can be earned) against its perceived costs. I will present a series of computationally-informed experiments that aimed to gain new insights into when and why people allocate—or withhold—cognitive effort, both from an individual differences perspective, and at the level of the task. In these experiments, we used psychophysiological measures to examine how much effort people expend (pupillometry) and the how people experience the expenditure of effort (facial EMG). Highlighting the usefulness of these measures, I will describe new work examining how physiological markers of online effort expenditure can be used to understand cognitive demand avoidance in the context of risky decision-making, shedding new light on ‘how we decide how to decide.’ Taken together, these lines of work illustrate how our decisions to exert mental effort can be understood in a decision-theoretic framework.