People put in more effort when they think they can learn something

What is it about?

People learn constantly, from memorizing game rules to going to law school. But as commonplace as learning is, choosing to learn over doing something else (scrolling, goofing off, etc) usually means choosing to do something that is both harder and less rewarding. And yet people do it anyway. This suggests that people are aware (even subconsciously) that learning has some value, potentially later in the future. We wrote down this hypothesis as a mathematical model of mental effort to make predictions about what choosing to apply more mental effort to learning might look like. We then tested this hypothesis in the first controlled study looking at whether people specifically apply more mental effort when they expect to learn more. We found that people are willing to invest more mental effort when they expect to learn, even when that learning is beyond their awareness.

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Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Although seemingly intuitive, before this paper, people had not carefully tested whether learning expectations led to a higher willingness to exert mental effort. Even more important, the learning expectations in this paper were designed to be at the limits of awareness, meaning that this process of dynamic mental effort allocation might be quite fundamental to how we decide to spend our time. Beyond helping us better understand the biological mind, the findings have implications for AI as well. Introducing the notion of effort in order to try harder where learning is more likely will yield better, more efficient AI systems.

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