Speakers
The Effort Paradox: Why Cognitive Work is Loathed and Loved
People and other animals dislike effort. This dislike is so robust in fact that in a discipline with few laws, psychology has proposed the law of least effort: when given equally rewarding options, organisms will choose option requiring the least amount of physical and cognitive work. Despite the robustness with which people avoid effort, there is also evidence that people find effort valuable and meaningful. In this talk, I will describe various lines of research that call the law of least effort into question. Despite effort being costly, that is, it is also valued. People and other animals value effort retrospectively, putting a premium on goods (e.g., food, IKEA furniture) that were acquired via high effort. Effort can also be valued prospectively, for example, via the process of learned industriousness when effort choices are reinforced and when effort is ascribed meaning and purpose. Finally, while people might prefer low over high effort, people prefer effort over doing nothing at all. Prominent models in psychology, neuroscience, and economics agree that effort is costly and avoided. Here, I highlight that this is only partly true, and that the law of least effort needs amending.
Normal Blindness: Why we look but fail to see
People, performing visual search tasks, often miss targets that are "right in front of their eyes". In the psychologically most interesting cases, these are the cases where observers fail to respond to stimuli that are clearly visible. The missed stimulus might be a typo (not very important) or a tumor (much more important). Observers can fail to respond even when they are directly fixating on or near significant stimuli. We can call these Looked But Failed to See (LBFTS) errors.
Such errors are not typically due to pathological visual problems. This is “normal blindness", normal because this type of blindness afflicts everyone. Some demonstrations of these LBFTS errors are famous (e.g. inattentional blindness for gorillas). Others seem more mundane. I will argue that a wide array of seemingly disparate LBFTS errors have a common basis. Normal blindness is the inevitable by-product of our limited-capacity visual system. These factors contribute to “normal” LBFTS errors.
Attention only selects a subset of available stimuli:
1. Attention is guided and can be misguided
2. Even attended items can be processed too briefly
3. Metacognition convinces you that you have ‘seen’ more than you have seen
These are processes that evolved to allow us to move through the world. However, they are virtually guaranteed to cause us to miss some significant stimuli. I will illustrate with examples from our work using eye tracking with radiologists and with "hybrid foraging" tasks, where observers look for multiple instances of multiple types of targets. If all goes well, you will look, you will fail to see, and you will gain insight into why that happens.
For more, see:
Wolfe, J. M., Kosovicheva, A., & Wolfe, B. A. (2022). Normal blindness: when we Look but Fail To See. Trends Cogn Sci, 26, 809-819. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.006
EMG reveals different motor control patterns for learned irrelevance and perseveration
Perseveration (PE) and learned irrelevance (LI) are mechanisms that impede attentional set-shifting. In visual discrimination learning tasks, PE refers to the inability to inhibit responding to the previously relevant stimulus attribute when it becomes irrelevant. In contrast, LI refers to the difficulty to redirect one's attention to a previously irrelevant stimulus dimension when it becomes relevant. Many clinical populations, including patients suffering from frontal lobe dysfunction, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, or schizophrenia, have impairments of PE, LI, or both. However, the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying these forms of attentional set-shifting are still uncertain. In this study, we used a newly developed LIPE task combined with EMG recording on healthy young adults to understand the temporal dynamics of motor control underlying the two shifting forms. The LIPE task reliably differentiated LI and PE conditions, with RTs significantly longer and error rate higher in the PE condition than in the LI condition, with both attentional set-shifting conditions different (longer RTs and decreased accuracy) from the control condition. Furthermore, EMG recording revealed that all conditions differed in premotor time (with LI and PE being longer than responses in the control condition) but not in motor time. Finally, efficiency to inhibit subliminal erroneous response activations observed as partial errors also depended on the task condition. Inhibition was less efficient in the PE than in the LI and in both attentional set-shifting conditions compared to the control condition. These results indicate that PE and LI conditions differ in motor control processes.
Costs of Control: Attentional and Motivational Consequences of Uncontrollability
Experiences of uncontrollability affect cognitive performance measured with a variety of tasks that engage effortful information processing. Some explanations of these effects highlight the role of decreased efficiency of cognitive control. In line with this approach, we show that prolonged experiences of control deprivation affect attentional control and cognitive flexibility, indexed by decreased ability to select goal-relevant information and to flexibly shift attention in accordance with changing task rules. We also show that induced uncontrollability impairs flexible learning from contextual cues, assessed by the magnitude of the context specific proportion congruency effect.
However, an alternative approach that can explain these effects of lower cognitive performance as a result of control deprivation focuses on motivational factors, such as a tendency to avoid cognitive effort. We tested whether uncontrollability leads to effort avoidance, using behavioral (i.e., the Demand Selection Task) and psychophysiological (Pre-ejection Period) measures and obtained initial evidence that high (vs low) levels of uncontrollability can lead to withdrawal of effort. However, this relation seems to depend on other factors, such as perceptions of cognitive demand imposed by the uncontrollability experience. We discuss the conditions that can determine cognitive effort investment (vs withdrawal) as a response to uncontrollability, highlighting the importance of considering subjective experiences associated with uncontrollability (e.g., difficulty, uncertainty) and effort valuation in future research.
Juan Lupiáñez Castillo - Universidad de Granada
Motivational/emotional and resource modulation of attention allocation and maintenance: Research with the ANTI-Vea task.
Motivation and some emotional states are known to enhance the allocation of attention, whereas resource constraint appears to impair it. I will describe the research we have conducted in our group over the past few years, using the ANTI- Vea task, which is suitable for measuring different attentional functions (i.e., Alertness, Attentional Orientating and Executive Control) simultaneously with Executive and Arousal Vigilance, to investigate how motivation or emotional state and resource constraint (e.g., through sleep deprivation and/or through time on task) affect attentional deployment especially cognitive control.
Cognitive Control appears to decrease with time on task, at least when performing very demanding tasks such as ANTI-Vea. On the other hand, resource restriction through sleep deprivation throughout the night causes significant decreases in Cognitive Control and Executive/Arousal Vigilance. Motivation can partially compensate for these decrements, although it cannot completely counteract the effects of resource depletion. I will discuss how the ANTI-Vea could be used to investigate how people's approach to managing cognitive effort affects the deployment of cognitive control and, consequently, performance success.
Carlos González - Universidad de Granada
Exploring the Interplay between Affective States, Metacognition, and Cognitive Control
In this talk, I will discuss two recent studies that explore the relationship between affect, metacognition and cognitive effort. The first study examined the impact of negative affective states on the avoidance of cognitively demanding tasks. Despite the expectation that negative affective states would increase task avoidance, the results showed that induced affective states did not modulate the avoidance of demand, although they did impact task performance and subjective experience. These findings suggest that the effect of affective signals on cognitive control may be limited and context-dependent.
The second study investigated aversive metacognitive experiences that are associated with the exertion of cognitive control. The study tracked several metacognitive experiences (such as conflict negativity, boredom, effort, fatigue, and frustration) over two hours of time on a cognitive control task, and investigated which experience was most closely related to model- and neural-based measures of performance. The results showed that different metacognitive experiences of effortful control exertion have distinct signaling functions, with conflict negativity and frustration most closely tracking the performance costs of control, and fatigue and boredom most closely tracking strategic changes in the decision boundary. Together, these studies provide insights into the complex interplay between affective states, metacognitive experiences, and cognitive control.
Luis Cásedas - Universidad de Granada
An Integrative Perspective on Mindfulness-Induced Cognitive Change
In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of scientific studies investigating the positive impact of mindfulness meditation on a range of areas, including cognitive functioning. Given its fundamental role in goal-directed behavior and self-regulation, the function of executive control has received particular attention from the field, with several meta-analyses now suggesting a positive impact of mindfulness training on this cognitive domain. Despite this, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood.
In this review, we examine existing theoretical accounts that attempt to explain the enhancement of executive control through mindfulness training and integrate them with state-of-the-art knowledge about the mechanisms of cognitive training in general. In doing so, we propose an original theoretical account, the Capacity-Efficiency Mindfulness (CEM) framework, which posits that mindfulness meditation does not necessarily increase available cognitive resources, but rather enables a more efficient use of them. The model emphasizes the critical role that emotion and mind-wandering play in determining the efficiency with which executive control can be used, providing a novel explanatory lens for the phenomenon and generating predictions to be tested in future research.
Rafael Román Caballero - Universidad de Granada
Musical training as a cognitive enhancer: Toward a mechanism of neurocognitive changes
There is currently a growing interest in ways to enhance and preserve our cognitive skills through changes in lifestyle. Education, physical exercise, and cognitively stimulating occupations and leisure activities have all been associated with neurocognitive benefits and the prevention of the pervasive consequences of neural aging. Among them, a wealth of studies has associated musical training, and particularly learning to play an instrument, with differences in auditory and sensorimotor skills, as well as in multiple non-musical cognitive capacities: intelligence, visuospatial abilities, processing speed, executive control, attention and vigilance, episodic and working memory, and language.
I revise here the available evidence, including evidence from our laboratory, which supports a small far transfer effect of musical training (d ≈ 0.20), with several factors likely increasing that effect: pretraining cognitive performance, SES, and age of the participants. In addition, I propose several non-exclusive mechanisms to explain cognitive benefits of musical training. Given the high demands that musical practice places on multiple cognitive functions (e.g., memory): (a) learning to play an instrument could specifically enhance cognitive abilities through neuroplasticity as a consequence of the increased use of those abilities; (b) it might promote the use of more efficient strategies (e.g., improved rehearsal mechanism and semantic organization); (c) as it is a multisensory activity, it might lead to multimodal representations of real-life events (e.g., spatial or visual representation of auditory words), enriching them with complementary inputs; (d) the characteristics of musical training might build a greater propensity for effort (i.e., learned industriousness), making effortful tasks less aversive and more engaging; and (e) the enhancements on domain-general cognitive functions, especially attention and executive control, might spread their benefits to other cognitive tasks, such as preventing the interference of irrelevant events in working memory.
Effortful proactive control and its links to motivation
Proactive executive control refers to the ability of deploying top-down regulations ahead of time, aimed at strategic guiding our goal-directed actions, and overcoming reflexive, impulsive, or habitual conflicting behavioral tendencies. It has been proposed that executive control is mechanistically implemented via theta-band (3-8 Hz) oscillatory activity, which functionally connects the medial frontal cortex (MFC) with task-relevant sensory and motor areas. Here, we investigated the dynamics of theta-band activity in proactive control.
In two EEG experiments, participants (N 59) performed the flanker task, in which conflict stems from simultaneous activation of two competing response programs entailed by target and flanker stimuli. To involve proactive control, trials with response conflict were signaled by explicit predictive cues. The results showed that in the cue-target interval, predictive cueing triggered a burst of theta power localized in the right dorsal and ventral lateral prefrontal cortices, along with increased theta power in the MFC. Source-level inter-regional phase coherence showed that these lateral and midfrontal areas were functionally connected during the implementation of proactive control. Secondly, post-target EEG activity showed that predictive cueing reduced modulations of conflict-related local midfrontal theta power. Importantly, the theta effects were associated with smaller behavioral conflict costs, indicating that proactive pre-activation of executive control led to better performance thereby decreasing the demands for executive processes. The results will be discussed in light of the current issues of effortful control and motivation. Particularly, the issue of a large discrepancy in behavioral results of proactive control studies. While some studies failed to find any behavioral effect of proactive conflict cueing, others showed that motivation and avoidance of cognitive demand are two of the possible factors influencing proactive cueing.
Effortful proactive control and its links to motivation
Proactive executive control refers to the ability of deploying top-down regulations ahead of time, aimed at strategic guiding our goal-directed actions, and overcoming reflexive, impulsive, or habitual conflicting behavioral tendencies. It has been proposed that executive control is mechanistically implemented via theta-band (3-8 Hz) oscillatory activity, which functionally connects the medial frontal cortex (MFC) with task-relevant sensory and motor areas. Here, we investigated the dynamics of theta-band activity in proactive control.
I revise here the available evidence, including evidence from our laboratory, which supports a small far transfer effect of musical training (d ≈ 0.20), with several factors likely increasing that effect: In two EEG experiments, participants (N 59) performed the flanker task, in which conflict stems from simultaneous activation of two competing response programs entailed by target and flanker stimuli. To involve proactive control, trials with response conflict were signaled by explicit predictive cues. The results showed that in the cue-target interval, predictive cueing triggered a burst of theta power localized in the right dorsal and ventral lateral prefrontal cortices, along with increased theta power in the MFC. Source-level inter-regional phase coherence showed that these lateral and midfrontal areas were functionally connected during the implementation of proactive control. Secondly, post-target EEG activity showed that predictive cueing reduced modulations of conflict-related local midfrontal theta power. Importantly, the theta effects were associated with smaller behavioral conflict costs, indicating that proactive pre-activation of executive control led to better performance thereby decreasing the demands for executive processes. The results will be discussed in light of the current issues of effortful control and motivation. Particularly, the issue of a large discrepancy in behavioral results of proactive control studies. While some studies failed to find any behavioral effect of proactive conflict cueing, others showed that motivation and avoidance of cognitive demand are two of the possible factors influencing proactive cueing.
Bartosz Majchrowicz - Jagiellonian University, Kraków
Uncontrollability, Agency and Effort Investment
Our current study aimed to verify to what degree people experiencing uncontrollability tend to invest or withdraw effort. Although often assumed, empirical data has not satisfactorily supported the link between loss of control and effort withdrawal. Using Behavioural Helplessness Training followed by the Voluntary Task Switching procedure, we show that people in the no-control condition have a diminished tendency to switch tasks, which we treat as a primary marker of effortful action (as compared to less effortful staying with the same task). Moreover, this tendency interacts with the perceived effortfulness of the task, measured with the NASA Task Load Index.
During the talk, we will present more detailed data about the study and plans for a follow-up. In future research, we plan to adopt measures of the sense of agency to track whether and how uncontrollability interacts with the sense of agency in the face of effortful decisions. Finally, we outline plans for enriching current experimental setup with EEG recordings, focusing on event-related potentials related to agency and cognitive effort.