ArticleeLife2020
Forced choices reveal a trade-off between cognitive effort and physical pain.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 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
- 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
- Mental cost of simple(st) physical exertion.Cognition · 2026Article
- Demand avoidance in value-based choice under risk: A behavioral and pupillometric examination.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
- Competing cognitive pressures on human exploration in the absence of trade-off with exploitation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Towards an active inference account of deep meditative deconstruction.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Fatigue Symptoms Influence Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Physical effort and task errors influence the choice for cognitive offloading.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Neurometabolic predictors of mental effort in the frontal cortex.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- The effect of psychological manipulations on the development of secondary hyperalgesia: a critical review.Pain reports · 2025Review
- The pleasure of effort: Cognitive challenges trigger hedonic physiological responses.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Neural and Computational Mechanisms of Motivation and Decision-making.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Exercise-induced pain within endurance exercise settings: Definitions, measurement, mechanisms and potential interventions.Experimental physiology · 2024Review
- Bumpy ride ahead: Anticipated effort as emotional evidence?Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Acute stress promotes effort mobilization for safety-related goals.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Design and methods of the mobile assessment of cognition, environment, and sleep (MACES) feasibility study in newly diagnosed breast cancer patients.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Humans reconfigure target and distractor processing to address distinct task demands.Psychological review · 2024Article
- More than a feeling: physiological measures of affect index the integration of effort costs and rewards during anticipatory effort evaluation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Effortfulness of visual working memory: Gauged by physical exertion.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.