ArticleCurrent directions in psychological science2021
Decomposing the motivation to exert mental effort.
Article in Current directions in psychological science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
- Motivation to exert effort dynamically adapts to reward context and environmental controllability.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to Physical and Cognitive Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Review
- Metacognitive Ratings on Cognitive Tasks: Task Difficulty and Effort Rating Differences in Children With ADHD and Neurotypical Children.Journal of attention disorders · 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
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Cognitive offloading reduces internal memory processing in children.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Characterizing alterations in attention networks under high mental workload.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Tobacco deprivation impairs metacognitive accuracy and cognitive flexibility.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Neural evidence of task efficacy affecting cognitive control in test-anxious individuals.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Behavioral and neural dysfunctions in reward-related cognitive control among adolescents with major depressive disorder.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Does expecting external memory support cost recognition memory?Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Reduced relational and item-specific processing in cognitive offloading.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Characterizing age-related change in learning the value of cognitive effort.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- An inverted U-shaped relationship between chronic stress and the motivation to expend effort for reward.Neurobiology of stress · 2025Article
- Understanding cognitive control in depression: the interactive role of emotion, expected efficacy and reward.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- Effort drives saccade selection.eLife · 2025Article
- Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- No evidence for decision fatigue using large-scale field data from healthcare.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The Extended Mind in Young Children: Cost-Dependent Trade-Off Between External and Internal Memory.Psychological science · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Achieving most goals demands cognitive control, yet people vary widely in their success at meeting these demands. While motivation is known to be fundamental to determining these successes, what determines one's motivation to perform a given task remains poorly understood. Here, we describe recent efforts towards addressing this question using the Expected Value of Control model, which simulates the process by which people weigh the costs and benefits of exerting mental effort. By functionally decomposing this cost-benefit analysis, this model has been used to fill gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms of mental effort and to generate novel predictions about the sources of variability in real-world performance. We discuss the opportunities the model provides for formalizing hypotheses about why people vary in their motivation to perform tasks, as well as for understanding limitations in our ability to test these hypotheses based on a given measure of performance.
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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.