ArticleNeuropsychologia2023
Cognitive effort and active inference.
Article in Neuropsychologia, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unveiling the Aha! moment: A computational account of insight in active inference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Predictive Processing in Sport and Exercise Science: A Scoping Review and Theoretical Overview.Sports medicine - open · 2026Review
- Understanding mechanisms of voluntary engagement of mental effort using active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- From self-organizing systems to subjective temporal extension.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- A Rosetta Stone hypothesis for neurophenomenology: mathematical predictions from predictive processing.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Age-Related Increase in Locus Ceruleus Activity and Connectivity with the Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguity Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Meta-Reinforcement Learning reconciles surprise, value, and control in the anterior cingulate cortex.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- An active inference account of stuttering behavior.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- When the interoceptive and conceptual clash: The case of oppositional phenomenal self-modelling in Tourette syndrome.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Joint modeling of choices and reaction times based on Bayesian contextual behavioral control.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Active Inference and Social Actors: Towards a Neuro-Bio-Social Theory of Brains and Bodies in Their Worlds.Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie · 2024Article
- Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Models of the Translation Process and the Free Energy Principle.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Adversarial inference: predictive minds in the attention economy.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This paper aims to integrate some key constructs in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control and executive function by formalising the notion of cognitive (or mental) effort in terms of active inference. To do so, we call upon a task used in neuropsychology to assess impulse inhibition-a Stroop task. In this task, participants must suppress the impulse to read a colour word and instead report the colour of the text of the word. The Stroop task is characteristically effortful, and we unpack a theory of mental effort in which, to perform this task accurately, participants must overcome prior beliefs about how they would normally act. However, our interest here is not in overt action, but in covert (mental) action. Mental actions change our beliefs but have no (direct) effect on the outside world-much like deploying covert attention. This account of effort as mental action lets us generate multimodal (choice, reaction time, and electrophysiological) data of the sort we might expect from a human participant engaging in this task. We analyse how parameters determining cognitive effort influence simulated responses and demonstrate that-when provided only with performance data-these parameters can be recovered, provided they are within a certain range.
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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.