ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2019
The Subjective Value of Cognitive Effort is Encoded by a Domain-General Valuation Network.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 76 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
76 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The neural basis of cost-benefit trade-offs in effort investment: a quantitative activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- A randomized proof-of-mechanism trial of TNF antagonism for motivational deficits and related corticostriatal circuitry in depressed patients with high inflammation.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Noninvasive Brain Stimulation over the Frontopolar Cortex Promotes Willingness to Exert Cognitive Effort in a Foraging-Like Sequential Choice Task.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Trial
- Catecholaminergic modulation of the cost of cognitive control in healthy older adults.PloS one · 2020Trial
- Reward sensitivity is negatively associated with future self-continuity: the mediation role of functional connectivity between the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Changing the motivation for mental work with temporal interference stimulation.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Towards a domain-general mechanistic model of fatigue: application to Functional Neurological Disorder.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Fatigue Symptoms Influence Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Neural and computational mechanisms of effort under the pressure of a deadline.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Contributions of the basolateral amygdala and nucleus accumbens to sustaining not just initiating cognitive effort.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Empathy motivation is preserved following amygdala damage.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Article
- Integrating arousal and valence approaches to advance cognitive effort research.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- The Frontopolar Cortex Contributes to Motivating Cognitive Effort Exertion during Adaptive Decision-Making.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Psychological interventions that decrease psychological distance or challenge system justification increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Fatigue Symptoms Influence Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- A behavioural and neurobiological assessment of effort-based decision-making in cannabis use disorder: An initial/preliminary investigation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- The Role of Cognitive Effort in Emotion Regulation.Affective science · 2025Review
- Striatal dopamine can enhance both fast working memory, and slow reinforcement learning, while reducing implicit effort cost sensitivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Dynamic Functional Connectivity Between Amygdala and Cognitive Control Network Predicts Delay Discounting in Older Adolescents.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
16 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cognitive control is necessary for goal-directed behavior, yet people treat cognitive control demand as a cost, which discounts the value of rewards in a similar manner as other costs, such as delay or risk. It is unclear, however, whether the subjective value (SV) of cognitive effort is encoded in the same putatively domain-general brain valuation network implicated in other cost domains, or instead engages a distinct frontoparietal network, as implied by recent studies. Here, we provide rigorous evidence that the valuation network, with core foci in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, also encodes SV during cognitive effort-based decision-making in healthy, male and female adult humans. We doubly dissociate this network from frontoparietal regions that are instead recruited as a function of decision difficulty. We show that the domain-general valuation network jointly and independently encodes both reward benefits and cognitive effort costs. We also demonstrate that cognitive effort SV signals predict choice and are influenced by state and trait motivation, including sensitivity to reward and anticipated task performance. These findings unify cognitive effort with other cost domains, and suggest candidate neural mechanisms underlying state and trait variation in willingness to expend cognitive effort.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.