Short-term memory capacity predicts willingness to expend cognitive effort for reward

Abstract

We must often decide whether the effort required for a task is worth the reward. Past rodent work suggests that willingness to deploy cognitive effort can be driven by individual differences in perceived reward value, depression, or chronic stress. However, many factors driving cognitive effort deployment - such as short-term memory ability - cannot easily be captured in rodents. Furthermore, we do not fully understand how individual differences in short-term memory ability, depression, chronic stress, and reward anticipation impact cognitive effort deployment for reward. Here, we examined whether these factors predict cognitive effort deployment for higher reward in an online visual short-term memory task. Undergraduate participants were grouped into high and low effort groups (nHighEffort = 348, nLowEffort = 81; nFemale = 332, nMale = 92, MAge = 20.37, RangeAge = 16-42) based on decisions in this task. After completing a monetary incentive task to measure reward anticipation, participants completed short-term memory task trials where they could choose to encode either fewer (low effort/reward) or more (high effort/reward) squares before reporting whether or not the colour of a target square matched the square previously in that location. We found that only greater short-term memory ability predicted whether participants chose a much higher proportion of high vs. low effort trials. Drift diffusion modeling showed that high effort group participants were more biased than low effort group participants towards selecting high effort trials. Our findings highlight the role of individual differences in cognitive effort ability in explaining cognitive effort deployment choices. Significance statementWe must often make decisions about when cognitive effort is worth the potential reward. Reward value, depression, and chronic stress in rodents can impact cognitive effort deployment decisions for reward, but factors like short-term memory ability can only be easily characterized in humans. We examined whether short-term memory ability, depression, chronic stress, and reward anticipation predict cognitive effort decisions for reward. In a short-term visual memory task with a choice of easier or harder trials for low vs. high reward, we found that only short-term memory ability predicted more choices of high vs. low effort trials. This research suggests that cognitive effort decisions could be driven by cognitive effort ability more than motivational factors like depression or chronic stress.