Cognitive effort and decision-making: integrating computational, behavioral, and psychophysiological approaches

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Everyday experiences are defined by decisions, from deciding what to eat for lunch to making career choices, but not all of our decisions come about the same way: some decisions are made with effort and are slow, while other decisions are easier and made quickly. The proposed research aims to elucidate when effortful processes are deployed the service of maximizing rewards. This aim will be met by addressing three fundamental questions: 1) how do people calculate and balance the relative costs and benefits of cognitive effort, 2) what are the psychophysiological markers of these costs and benefits and how do these signals influence the expenditure of cognitive effort as evidenced by behavior, and 3) how do individual differences in cognitive ability influence this cost-benefit calculus?