ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2020
Losses Motivate Cognitive Effort More Than Gains in Effort-Based Decision Making and Performance.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- When effort fuels risk: Cognitive exertion increases risk-taking for gains but reduces it for losses.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- 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
- Agile nudge implementation to improve minority recruitment in community-based research.Frontiers in health services · 2026Article
- Fatigue Symptoms Influence Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- The Neurobiology of Cognitive Fatigue and Its Influence on Effort-Based Choice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Feasibility and acceptability of a parent-child intervention to improve step count in childhood cancer survivors exposed to cardiotoxic therapy: The STEP UP for FAMILIES Study.Pediatric blood & cancer · 2024Article
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Nudge Theory in Improving the Oral Self-Care of Schoolchildren with Refugee and Immigrant Backgrounds in Mashhad, Iran.Dentistry journal · 2024Article
- Acute stress promotes effort mobilization for safety-related goals.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Cognitive Effort-Based Decision-Making Across Experimental and Daily Life Indices in Younger and Older Adults.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2023Article
- Zoom behavior during visual search modulates pupil diameter and reflects adaptive control states.PloS one · 2023Article
- Disordered Decision Making: A Cognitive Framework for Apathy and Impulsivity in Huntington's Disease.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2022Review
- The Cost of Imagined Actions in a Reward-Valuation Task.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Cognitive Control as a Multivariate Optimization Problem.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Aversive motivation and cognitive control.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human behavior is more strongly driven by the motivation to avoid losses than to pursue gains (loss aversion). However, there is little research on how losses influence the motivation to exert effort. We compared the effects of loss and gain incentives on cognitive task performance and effort-based decision making. In three experiments, participants performed a cognitively effortful task under gain and loss conditions and made choices about effort expenditure in a decision-making task. Results consistently showed significant loss aversion in effort-based decision making. Participants were willing to invest more effort in the loss compared to the gain condition (i.e., perform a longer duration task: Experiments 1 and 2; or higher task load: Experiment 3). On the other hand, losses did not lead to improved performance (sustained attention), or higher physiological effort (pupil diameter) in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 3, losses did enhance working memory performance, but only at the highest load level. Taken together, these results suggest that loss aversion motivates higher effort investment in effort-based decision-making, while the effect of loss aversion during a performance may depend on the task type or effort level.
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