Commentary/Kurzhan et al.: An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance stmggle - they involve the recognition of systematic changes in preference over time, and responses to die anticipated inconsistency. The "resolutions" people make are central. The "resolution" is more than a plan; it anticipates a future in which some altemative to that current plan might be more attractive. Moreover, tlie resolution seems to preemptively apply some force to oppose the foreseen reversal. The nature of diat force is not completely understood, but Ainslie (1975; 1992; 2001) productively suggested that when remembered, a past resolution makes the odierwise appealing plan-for example, to binge today but diet tomorrow-less plausible. I could say, "Just diis last one, and dien I will be good." But if I made a similar resolution yesterday, I have reason to believe I cannot botli binge today and be confident my resolution about tomorrow will fare any better than yesterday's. In other words, an interest in a particular future behavior, and uncertainty diat the interest wül be reaUzed, indirecdy gives force to resolutions, since diey cause current behavior to have added importance beyond what is UteraUy at stake (Monterosso & Ainslie 1999). This sort of intemal dialog-the resolution, transgression, regret, and back around again to anodier resolution - is, we diink, familiar to most people. To the extent that this process yields regularity in outcomes, the regularities diverge from the pattems higliüghted in the wiU-as-muscle literature. Most notably, a single failure appears to often tum into a protracted run of failures (known as tlie "abstinence violation effect"; Shiffman et al. 1996). There is nothing widiin the depletion account tliat predicts diis phenomenon, but it foUows naturaUy as a collapse of confidence, if the force of a resolution rests in part on the beUef that continued resolve is possible if the resolution is kept. The wiUpower-as-muscle metaphor has brought attention within the behaxdoral sciences to wülpower stmggle. If Kurzban and coUeagues are successful in casting doubt on the metaphor's usefulness, then it wül be a good time to consider altemative positive accounts of wülpower. Intrapersonal bargaining provides, we think, a promising framework.
Effort aversiveness may be functional, but does it reflect opportunity cost? doi:10.1017/S0140525X13001131. David Navon Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel. dnavon @ psy.iiaifa.ac.ii
Abstract: Though tlie aversiveness of effort may indeed serve in selecting tasks for executive attention, the notion that it reflects opportunity costs is quesüonable: The potency of distractions in real-life situations is not regularly related with the potential benefit from attending to tliem.
The argument from which Kurzban et al. set out in dieir theoretical discussion is that resource scarcity does not satisfactorily explain two weU-known phenomena: (1) Performance of volitionally selected tasks often feels like it requires mental effort. (2) That feeling is aversive. I concur. Subjective effort may have nothing to do with the amount of processing resources expended on an executed task (and it is, furthermore, yet unclear to what extent, if at aU, variance in task performance is due to die amount of avaüable resources, since it may as weU be due to cross-talk or some odier sort of outcome confiict; see Hirst & Kalmar 1987; Navon 1984; Navon & MiUer 1987). In my view, effort is the typical coroUaiy of attentional selection per se: "Effort is not any scarce commodity. It is the aversive valence of the operation of decouphng. The more sustained decoupling is, die more aversive it is" (Navon 1989, p. 203).
The term decoupling denotes an inhibitory operation (mediated by selectively attenuating some communication channels) meant for attaining effective attentional emphasis sufficient for widistanding distractions. That operation seems useful for actuating any task that is not habitual enough to benefit from being served by a dedicated, special-purpose communication channel, and hence must resort to gaining temporary high visibüity, subjectively felt as awareness, within an intemal communication network accessible by numerous processing modules (for more detaü, cf Navon 1989, pp. 200-201). Fuithermore, as stated in Navon (1989): "because effort is aversive, motivation is needed to override the aversion" (p. 203). Therefore, to the extent diat aversion is functional, the function of aversion may be to set a high enough hurdle that would most often select for focal attention the best-fitting candidate - that task which the subject is at the time most motivated for. Tasks for which the subject is only müdly motivated are unlikely to be selected, as motivation in this case would often not outweigh effort aversion. Further on, a selected task whose momentary appeal has decreased witli time may not be maintained in focal attention, or at least may be less immune to distraction, once the motivation does not suffice anymore to outweigh the aversiveness of effort. Aversiveness is a particularly good guide, because it is a sort of sentience. Just like the effect of suffering muscle aches on the determination of a marathon mnner to keep mnning must be greater than whatever effect die mere cognitive feedback about physiological measures could have, the felt aversion to keeping tlie execution of a mental assignment must predict persistence more than would a mental act of merely deliberating how the time could have been alternatively spent. So far, I suppose, my stance does not appear significandy discordant with the thesis proposed in the target article. Yet, I do have some reservations about the notion that aversion is home by computing opportunity costs. Though people clearly prefer to engage in rewarding activities, it seems a bit hard to believe that our information-processing system as a mle manages to gauge and rank on-line, albeit implicitly, the costs/benefits of all altematives (or even only the most salient ones) sufficiendy for estimating opportunity costs. Is it a closed set at aU? How large, for example, is the set of aU altematives for what I am doing right now to generate this written sentence? Furthermore, some of the most powerful triggers of distraction, that naturaUy require much effort to withstand, are transient stimuU or associations that, in spite of their high capturing potential, would not much benefit a subject's functioning in the short mn or weU-being in the longer mn. To illustrate, my concentration over conceiving and phrasing this sentence woijld clearly have been much harmed if a fiying bird presendy had found its way into my office, worse yet if some obsessive image or thought had popped up in my mind. I doubt that I would have been as much distracted by a potential refiection about the next-best objective diat I could have otherwise engaged myself with. In passing, is it just incidental that I am now failing to find anytliing like diat in my short term memory (STM)? Hence, it seems debatable that effort aversiveness is nothing but die felt output of the computation of opportunity costs. Anyhow, that sort of aversion need not reflect opportunity cost to be functional. If its inherent function is to constitute a hurdle high enough for selecting die task that die subject is most motivated for (and later, for maintaining focused attention there), aversion could simply be the experienced output of the extent of decoupling required for doing that. FinaUy, performance may deteriorate with time neither becattse processing resources deplete, as often beUeved (e.g., CaiUiot & Baumeister 2007), nor because the priority of the attended-to task somewhat declines, as Kurzban et al. suggest. Possibly, the effectiveness of the inhibitory operation termed "decoupling" here, may tend to slowly decay for some reason. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2013) 36:6
701
Commentary/Kurzhan et al.: An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task perfonnance Alternatively, the products of pre-attentive processing of unattended objects, perhaps occasionaffy exercising some failed attempts to invoke attention to diemsefves, püe up over time in some push-down stack which might bear a graduaf increase of outcome conflict, in tum causing distractions to become progressively harder and harder to widistand. To date, diere seems to be no sufficient evidence to substantiate any one of diese conjectures.
The costs of giving up: Action versus inaction asymmetries in regret doi:10.1017/S0140525X13001143 Antoinette Nicolle and Kevin Riggs Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, United Kingdom. [email protected] [email protected]
Effort aversiveness may be functional, but does it reflect opportunity cost? doi:10.1017/S0140525X13001131. David Navon Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel. dnavon @ psy.iiaifa.ac.ii
Abstract: Though tlie aversiveness of effort may indeed serve in selecting tasks for executive attention, the notion that it reflects opportunity costs is quesüonable: The potency of distractions in real-life situations is not regularly related with the potential benefit from attending to tliem.
The argument from which Kurzban et al. set out in dieir theoretical discussion is that resource scarcity does not satisfactorily explain two weU-known phenomena: (1) Performance of volitionally selected tasks often feels like it requires mental effort. (2) That feeling is aversive. I concur. Subjective effort may have nothing to do with the amount of processing resources expended on an executed task (and it is, furthermore, yet unclear to what extent, if at aU, variance in task performance is due to die amount of avaüable resources, since it may as weU be due to cross-talk or some odier sort of outcome confiict; see Hirst & Kalmar 1987; Navon 1984; Navon & MiUer 1987). In my view, effort is the typical coroUaiy of attentional selection per se: "Effort is not any scarce commodity. It is the aversive valence of the operation of decouphng. The more sustained decoupling is, die more aversive it is" (Navon 1989, p. 203).
The term decoupling denotes an inhibitory operation (mediated by selectively attenuating some communication channels) meant for attaining effective attentional emphasis sufficient for widistanding distractions. That operation seems useful for actuating any task that is not habitual enough to benefit from being served by a dedicated, special-purpose communication channel, and hence must resort to gaining temporary high visibüity, subjectively felt as awareness, within an intemal communication network accessible by numerous processing modules (for more detaü, cf Navon 1989, pp. 200-201). Fuithermore, as stated in Navon (1989): "because effort is aversive, motivation is needed to override the aversion" (p. 203). Therefore, to the extent diat aversion is functional, the function of aversion may be to set a high enough hurdle that would most often select for focal attention the best-fitting candidate - that task which the subject is at the time most motivated for. Tasks for which the subject is only müdly motivated are unlikely to be selected, as motivation in this case would often not outweigh effort aversion. Further on, a selected task whose momentary appeal has decreased witli time may not be maintained in focal attention, or at least may be less immune to distraction, once the motivation does not suffice anymore to outweigh the aversiveness of effort. Aversiveness is a particularly good guide, because it is a sort of sentience. Just like the effect of suffering muscle aches on the determination of a marathon mnner to keep mnning must be greater than whatever effect die mere cognitive feedback about physiological measures could have, the felt aversion to keeping tlie execution of a mental assignment must predict persistence more than would a mental act of merely deliberating how the time could have been alternatively spent. So far, I suppose, my stance does not appear significandy discordant with the thesis proposed in the target article. Yet, I do have some reservations about the notion that aversion is home by computing opportunity costs. Though people clearly prefer to engage in rewarding activities, it seems a bit hard to believe that our information-processing system as a mle manages to gauge and rank on-line, albeit implicitly, the costs/benefits of all altematives (or even only the most salient ones) sufficiendy for estimating opportunity costs. Is it a closed set at aU? How large, for example, is the set of aU altematives for what I am doing right now to generate this written sentence? Furthermore, some of the most powerful triggers of distraction, that naturaUy require much effort to withstand, are transient stimuU or associations that, in spite of their high capturing potential, would not much benefit a subject's functioning in the short mn or weU-being in the longer mn. To illustrate, my concentration over conceiving and phrasing this sentence woijld clearly have been much harmed if a fiying bird presendy had found its way into my office, worse yet if some obsessive image or thought had popped up in my mind. I doubt that I would have been as much distracted by a potential refiection about the next-best objective diat I could have otherwise engaged myself with. In passing, is it just incidental that I am now failing to find anytliing like diat in my short term memory (STM)? Hence, it seems debatable that effort aversiveness is nothing but die felt output of the computation of opportunity costs. Anyhow, that sort of aversion need not reflect opportunity cost to be functional. If its inherent function is to constitute a hurdle high enough for selecting die task that die subject is most motivated for (and later, for maintaining focused attention there), aversion could simply be the experienced output of the extent of decoupling required for doing that. FinaUy, performance may deteriorate with time neither becattse processing resources deplete, as often beUeved (e.g., CaiUiot & Baumeister 2007), nor because the priority of the attended-to task somewhat declines, as Kurzban et al. suggest. Possibly, the effectiveness of the inhibitory operation termed "decoupling" here, may tend to slowly decay for some reason. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2013) 36:6
701
Commentary/Kurzhan et al.: An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task perfonnance Alternatively, the products of pre-attentive processing of unattended objects, perhaps occasionaffy exercising some failed attempts to invoke attention to diemsefves, püe up over time in some push-down stack which might bear a graduaf increase of outcome conflict, in tum causing distractions to become progressively harder and harder to widistand. To date, diere seems to be no sufficient evidence to substantiate any one of diese conjectures.
The costs of giving up: Action versus inaction asymmetries in regret doi:10.1017/S0140525X13001143 Antoinette Nicolle and Kevin Riggs Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, United Kingdom. [email protected] [email protected]
