ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Effort Foraging Task reveals positive correlation between individual differences in the cost of cognitive and physical effort in humans.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
- Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Japanese Version of the Physical Effort Scale.Journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Reward pursuit during a translational reward task correlates with anhedonia reductions following rTMS in patients with major depressive disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- The cognitive and motor determinants of the perception of effort.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
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Decision context and neurobehavioural disturbance in Huntington's disease.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Human foraging strategies flexibly adapt to resource distribution and time constraints.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Effects of physical effort on temporal processing.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
- Academic motivation-achievement cycle and the behavioural pathways: A short-timeframe experiment with manipulated perceived achievement.The British journal of educational psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Effort drives saccade selection.eLife · 2025Article
- Day-to-day fluctuations in motivation drive effort-based decision-making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Illuminating the impact of stress: In vivo approaches to track stress-related neural adaptations.Neurobiology of stress · 2025Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Increasing Response Vigour Under Time Pressure as a Transdiagnostic Marker of Eating Disorders.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Review
- Predecisional information search adaptively reduces three types of uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- No matter what you do, travel is travel in visual foraging.Vision research · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Generalized Encoding of the Relative Subjective Value of Cognitive Effort in the Dorsal ACC.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Effort-based decisions, in which people weigh potential future rewards against effort costs required to achieve those rewards involve both cognitive and physical effort, though the mechanistic relationship between them is not yet understood. Here, we use an individual differences approach to isolate and measure the computational processes underlying effort-based decisions and test the association between cognitive and physical domains. Patch foraging is an ecologically valid reward rate maximization problem with well-developed theoretical tools. We developed the Effort Foraging Task, which embedded cognitive or physical effort into patch foraging, to quantify the cost of both cognitive and physical effort indirectly, by their effects on foraging choices. Participants chose between harvesting a depleting patch, or traveling to a new patch that was costly in time and effort. Participants' exit thresholds (reflecting the reward they expected to receive by harvesting when they chose to travel to a new patch) were sensitive to cognitive and physical effort demands, allowing us to quantify the perceived effort cost in monetary terms. The indirect sequential choice style revealed effort-seeking behavior in a minority of participants (preferring high over low effort) that has apparently been missed by many previous approaches. Individual differences in cognitive and physical effort costs were positively correlated, suggesting that these are perceived and processed in common. We used canonical correlation analysis to probe the relationship of task measures to self-reported affect and motivation, and found correlations of cognitive effort with anxiety, cognitive function, behavioral activation, and self-efficacy, but no similar correlations with physical effort.
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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.