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Mental labour

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 899–908 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Mental effort is an elementary notion in our folk psychology and a familiar fixture in everyday introspective experience. However, as an object of scientific study, mental effort has remained rather elusive. Cognitive psychology has provided some tools for understanding how effort impacts performance, by linking effort with cognitive control function. What has remained less clear are the principles that govern the allocation of mental effort. Under what circumstances do people choose to invest mental effort, and when do they decline to do so? And what regulates the intensity of mental effort when it is applied? In new and promising work, these questions are being approached with the tools of behavioural economics. Though still in its infancy, this economic approach to mental effort research has already uncovered important aspects of effort-based decision-making, and points clearly to future lines of inquiry, including some intriguing opportunities presented by recent artificial intelligence research.

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Fig. 1: Behavioural paradigms that reveal a cost of cognitive control.
Fig. 2: Labour supply theory and mental effort.
Fig. 3: Evidence for individual differences correlations in effort-based decision-making.
Fig. 4: Transition structures, trial event sequences and results for multi-stage decision-making tasks.
Fig. 5: Schematic of the proposed multi-task learning model.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Wouter Kool

  2. DeepMind, London, UK

    Matthew Botvinick

  3. University College London, London, UK

    Matthew Botvinick

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Kool, W., Botvinick, M. Mental labour. Nat Hum Behav 2, 899–908 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0401-9

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