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Name: Personal
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Note: thesis: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
Genre (aat): theses
Abstract: Cognitive effort is often aversive, which is evident in people’s tendency to avoid cognitively demanding tasks. The intrinsic cost of effort has been coined as the ‘law of less work’ in psychology and has been considered an intrinsic disutility by economists. Despite its intuitive appeal the ‘law of least mental effort’ has received only limited experimentation. One theory to receive considerable recent empirical testing is the ‘cost of control’ hypothesis of cognitive effort, arguing that there is an intrinsic cost associated with recruiting cognitive control. Brain imaging studies have observed that cognitive effort is correlated with decreased responses in reward circuits but increased activity in the cognitive control network. However, there has been other contrasting evidence that neither reward-related nor control-related brain activity underlie cognitive effort avoidance. The present thesis argues that the discrepancy in the literature is due to 1) differences in task characteristics, 2) differences in task instructions, and 3) differences in the timing of measures. The goal of the present thesis is to test the cost accounts of cognitive effort while addressing the aforementioned limitations. Therefore, this thesis tests the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive effort avoidance during effort learning and decision-making in two fMRI experiments in healthy participants and a study of Parkinson’s Disease patients. The results diverge from a rigid ‘cost of control’ account in which the involvement of cognitive control is always net costly. Rather, engagement of cognitive control can sometimes register as net utility instead of a cost, depending on the individual, in the absence of external reward. Specifically, cognitive effort avoidance behavior was associated with the engagement of a task-negative network during effort execution and not the recruitment of fronto-parietal control network. Further, dopamine depleted Parkinson’s Disease patients showed effort seeking behavior, indicating that dopaminergic reward system might underlie cognitive effort avoidance, albeit by reducing the intrinsic value of the effort task. Thus, the present thesis argues that cognitive effort avoidance is driven by how rapidly a controlled task can be acquired, rather than the absolute level of cognitive control required to perform that task.
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00866540")
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Identifier: DOI: 10.26300/67r6-k060
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"): In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access: Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo): dissertations