Scope and Goal

We can all feel exhausted after a day of work, even if we have spent it sitting at a desk. The intuitive concept of mental effort pervades virtually all domains of human information processing and has become an indispensable ingredient for general theories of cognition. However, inconsistent use of the term across cognitive sciences, including cognitive psychology, education, human-factors engineering and artificial intelligence, makes it one of the least well-defined theoretical constructs across fields.

The purpose of our two-day workshop is to bridge this gap by (a) offering hands-on tutorials on different computational approaches used to model mental effort and by (b) fostering discussion about the operationalization of mental effort among scientists from different research communities and modeling backgrounds.

Keynote

• Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University)

List of Speakers (alphabetical order)

• Danielle Bassett (University of Pennsylvania)

• Michael Inzlicht (University of Toronto)

• Yuko Munakata (University of California, Davis)

• Amitai Shenhav (Brown University)

List of Tutorial Instructors (alphabetical order)

• Anastasia Bizyaeva (Princeton University)

• Alexander Fengler (Brown University)

• Michael J. Frank (Brown University)

• Andra Geana (Brown University)

• Renée S. Koolschijn, Hanneke den Ouden (Radboud University)

• Randall O'Reilly (University of California, Davis)

Sponsors

The 3rd Workshop on Mental Effort was possible thanks to the support of the William K. and Katherine W. Estes Fund which is jointly overseen by the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society, the Center for Computational Brain Science at the Carney Institute for Brain Science, as well as the Department for Cognitive, Linguistic, & Psychological Sciences at Brown University. We thank our sponsors for their generous support.