Highlights

A body of research suggests that people often shy away from mentally demanding tasks, with many studies explaining this behavior through an economic lens that views cognitive effort as inherently unpleasant.

While influential economic accounts assume that effort carries a subjective cost, it remains unclear how this cost might arise from first principles.

This review critically examines diverse theoretical perspectives – spanning information theory, psychology, and network control theory – which attempt to explain how controlled information processing generates the subjective experience of mental effort.

The review ultimately seeks to identify key unresolved questions that could help synthesize these varied theoretical approaches, providing a more comprehensive understanding of how and why people experience certain forms of information processing as effortful.

Abstract

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 perspectives (information-theoretic, psychological, and biological) to explain how the subjective experience of cognitive effort arises from controlled information processing, exploring their predictions concerning the simple observation that people experience tasks with high (versus low) working memory demands as costly. Finally, we identify open questions that might help bridge across these accounts.

Keywords

1. cognitive effort
2. cognitive control
3. costs
4. stability
5. flexibility
6. network control theory
7. bottlenecks
8. information theory
9. N-back task

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