ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Rewarding cognitive effort increases the intrinsic value of mental labor.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- An integrative review on unveiling the causes and effects of decision fatigue to develop a multi-domain conceptual framework.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Cognitive control training with domain-general response inhibition does not change children's brains or behavior.Nature neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Executive functions as a transdiagnostic endophenotype in developmental psychopathology.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Interest and effort in learning and performance.The British journal of educational psychology · 2026Article
- The experience of cognitive conflict is intrinsically rewarding.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Adaptive habits: understanding executive function and its development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- An 8-week jump training did not boost effort value or the willingness to exert effort in a student sample.PloS one · 2026Article
- Effortful leisure is a source of meaning in everyday life.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The pleasure of effort: Cognitive challenges trigger hedonic physiological responses.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Getting a grip on visual search: Relating effort exertion to the control of attention.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Review
- The Cost of Regulating Effort: Reward and Difficulty Cues With Longer Prediction Horizons Have a Stronger Impact on Performance.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Reward and Efficacy Modulate the Rate of Anticipatory Pupil Dilation.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- The effort hypothesis at the heart of the virtuous circle.EXCLI journal · 2025Review
- A study on the impact of project-based learning on students' learning motivation in animation programs.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- A Theoretical Framework for the Development of Need for Cognition in Childhood and Adolescence.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Review
- Humans do not avoid reactively implementing cognitive control.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2024Article
- Rethinking Distraction.Visual cognition · 2024Article
- The Willpower Paradox: Possible and Impossible Conceptions of Self-Control.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Learned industriousness as a translational mechanism in anorexia nervosa.Nature reviews psychology · 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
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Current models of mental effort in psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience typically suggest that exerting cognitive effort is aversive, and people avoid it whenever possible. The aim of this research was to challenge this view and show that people can learn to value and seek effort intrinsically. Our experiments tested the hypothesis that effort-contingent reward in a working-memory task will induce a preference for more demanding math tasks in a transfer phase, even though participants were aware that they would no longer receive any reward for task performance. In laboratory Experiment 1 (
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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.