Quantifying the Motivational Effects of Cognitive Fatigue Through Effort-Based Decision Making

Prolonged active engagement on cognitively demanding tasks often leads to a subjective state labeled cognitive fatigue (Meijman, 1991;Lorist et al., 2000).Although such fatigue is considered to be a complex, multifaceted state involving various causes and effects, it is widely acknowledged that reduced motivation for effort is one of its key aspects (van der Linden, 2011).Accordingly, there seems to be agreement that performance deficits in fatigue are likely to reflect a combination of reduced capacity and reduced willingness to perform (Kanfer and Ackerman, 1989;Meijman, 1991;Hockey, 1997).Despite such consensus, however, only a handful of studies have explicitly targeted the motivational factors that determine performance levels during fatigue.A potential reason for this lack of formal studies could be that motivation is particularly difficult to measure in other ways than by self-report, with the obvious drawbacks that subjects may not always be willing to report loss of motivation or may not be aware of it.In this paper, we argue that recently developed methods and insights from the field of effort-based decision making may help to elucidate how fatigue changes the motivation to perform (Chong et al., 2016;Pessiglione et al., 2017).We will discuss the parallels between theoretical models of fatigued performance and models of effort-based decision making.Further, we will discuss how methods from the effort-based decision-making field can be used to study motivational decline in fatigue-related conditions.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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