No Evidence for a Generalized Construct of Cognitive Effort Avoidance

In general, people tend to avoid exertion of cognitive effort, a finding that has been consistently observed in numerous behavioral paradigms that examine motivation to engage with or withdraw from cognitively demanding tasks. Here, we investigate whether these paradigms probe a common latent construct of cognitive effort avoidance by comparing participants’ (n=240) behavior in a battery of four established paradigms. As expected, on a group-level, participants displayed pronounced effort avoidance in each paradigm. However, a multivariate, multi-level Bayesian Modeling approach revealed that individual-level effort avoidance did not generalize across effort paradigms. Instead, for all but one paradigm, effort avoidance was mainly correlated with individuals’ performance in the cognitively demanding task specific to each paradigm. Our findings challenge the assumption that commonly used effort-based decision-making paradigms measure a person’s general sensitivity to cognitive effort, and call into question the notion of a generalized, task-independent tendency to avoid mental effort.