Why is Cognitive Effort Experienced as Costly?

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 about the simple observation that people avoid and report as unpleasant tasks with high (versus low) working-memory demands. Finally, we identify open questions which might help bridge across these accounts.