Understanding the source of effort changes how we design learning, workplaces, and tools that support thinking. If effort arises from information-theoretic limits, then rearranging tasks to reduce unnecessary memory load could improve performance. If biological constraints dominate, breaks and pacing might matter more than task design. If psychological factors are decisive, framing and incentives can shift choices about effort. These possibilities suggest concrete experiments and practical interventions that connect lab findings to daily life.
The article gathers these perspectives and points to gaps where they don’t yet meet. That gap is where progress on human potential will come from: linking models of information, motivation, and biology to shape environments that make effortful thinking more sustainable and inclusive. Read on to see how these different views might combine and what questions researchers need to answer to help more people engage in challenging thought.
A widespread observation is that people avoid mentally effortful courses of action, and much recent work examining cognitive effort has explained subjective effort evaluation – and, consequently, preferences – in economic terms, which assumes that the expenditure of cognitive effort is experienced as costly. However, this economic perspective is largely tacit about the source of these costs. Here, we review recent theoretical treatments of effort costs, which take vastly different perspectives (information-theoretic, psychological, and biological) to explain how the subjective experience of cognitive effort arises from controlled information processing, exploring their predictions concerning the simple observation that people experience tasks with high (versus low) working memory demands as costly. Finally, we identify open questions that might help bridge across these accounts.
