Testing Retrospective Evaluations of Mental Effort for the Peak-End Effect

Abstract

Previous work in the study of cognitive demand has established that effort is costly. When given the choice between two tasks, individuals demonstrate a consistent bias towards those tasks associated with lower levels of demand (Kool, Botvinick, McGquire, & Rosen, 2010). In the following study, task demand was manipulated in order to investigate if a longer task session might be preferred to a shorter one if the longer session maintained a lower peak-end average. Confirmation of the peak-end effect of mental effort would demonstrate a violation in the rule of temporal monotonicity and serve to question a physical account of mental effort that associates effort with a finite resource.