Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? (opens in new tab)

A widespread observation is that people avoid mentally effortful courses of action, and much recent work examining cognitive effort has explained subjective effort evaluation – and, consequently, preferences – in economic terms, which assumes that the expenditure of cognitive effort is experienced as costly. However, this economic perspective is largely tacit about the source of these costs. Here, we review recent theoretical treatments of effort costs, which take vastly different perspective...