Characterizing age-related change in learning the value of cognitive effort.

Abstract

Adults often titrate the degree of their cognitive effort in an economical manner: they "think hard" when the reward benefits of a task exceed its difficulty costs. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether and how children and adolescents adjust their cognitive effort according to multiple cues about its worthwhileness, including in novel environments where these cues must be learned through experience. Given that the processing of incentive and demand information changes with age, the present study examines participants' (primary experiment N_usable = 150, secondary experiment N_usable = 150, ages 10-20 years) performance across two task-switching paradigms that manipulated the rewards offered for, and the difficulty of, engaging cognitive effort. In the primary experiment, reward cues were instructed but difficulty cues were learnable. In the secondary experiment, the reward and difficulty cues were both instructed, eliminating learning demands and effectively making the task easier. The primary experiment revealed that although less difficult contexts promoted greater accuracy at the group level, the regulation of cognitive effort according to higher and lower incentives emerged with age. Especially early in the task, older participants achieved greater accuracy for higher incentives. Younger participants, unexpectedly, achieved greater accuracy for lower incentives and adolescents performed similarly for each reward level. Nonetheless, participants of all ages self-reported trying their hardest for higher incentives, but only adults translated this aim into action. The secondary experiment revealed that in an overall easier task environment, cognitive effort did not become increasingly economical with age. Taken together, this pattern of findings suggests that different sources and amounts of information, and the conditions they are presented in, shape learning the value of cognitive effort from late childhood to early adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).