Forced choices reveal a trade-off between cognitive effort and physical pain

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Cognitive effort is described as aversive, and people will generally avoid it when possible. This aversion to effort is believed to arise from a cost–benefit analysis of the actions available. The comparison of cognitive effort against other primary aversive experiences, however, remains relatively unexplored. Here, we offered participants choices between performing a cognitively demanding task or experiencing thermal pain. We found that cognitive effort can be traded off for physical pain and that people generally avoid exerting high levels of cognitive effort. We also used computational modelling to examine the aversive subjective value of effort and its effects on response behaviours. Applying this model to decision times revealed asymmetric effects of effort and pain, suggesting that cognitive effort may not share the same basic influences on avoidance behaviour as more primary aversive stimuli such as physical pain.

Data availability

All data analyzed for this study can be found on OSF (https://osf.io/n4cht/).

The following data sets were generated

1. Vogel TA
2. Otto R
(2020) Forced Choices Reveal a Trade-Off between Cognitive Effort and Physical Pain
Open Science Framework, n4cht.

https://osf.io/n4cht/

Article and author information

Author details

Todd A Vogel

Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

For correspondence
todd.vogel@mail.mcgill.ca

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0895-3845
Zachary M Savelson

Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
A Ross Otto

Department of Psychology, McGill University, Quebec, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9997-1901
Mathieu Roy

Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

For correspondence
mathieu.roy3@mcgill.ca

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2017-03918)

A Ross Otto

Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (2018-NC-204806)

A Ross Otto

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2016-06682)

Mathieu Roy

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Informed written consent was obtained from all participants and the study was approved by the McGill University Research Ethics Board (REB File # 247-1117).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.