Demand Avoidance in Risky Choice: A Behavioral and Pupillometric Examination

Why does decision-making sometimes feel demanding while other times feel effortless? The dominant view of cognitive effort suggests that, else being equal, individuals prefer to avoid mentally effortful courses of action—an empirical phenomenon which has been well-studied in cognitive control paradigms. However, less work has investigated cognitive demand avoidance in value-based decisions. Here we investigate subjective (self-reported) demand, preferences for demand, and psychophysiological measures of effort outlay in the context of risky decision-making. Across three experiments (N=199), we observe that individuals evaluate choice pairs—consisting of two options with described risk levels and reward magnitudes—with less discriminable expected value differences as subjectively more demanding. More interestingly, participants exhibit a robust preference for low-effort risky choice pairs in a novel Demand Avoidance Task, which we modeled after well-characterized effort preference paradigms used in the cognitive control domain. Finally, using pupillometry, we find that participants, contrary to our expectations, exhibit larger task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs)—a well-characterized measure of momentary effort exertion—when choosing between low-demand risky choice pairs, and that these TEPR magnitudes predicted demand-avoidant preferences in a subsequent test phase. Together, these results demonstrate that cognitive demand avoidance generalizes beyond cognitive control tasks to risky value-based choice.