Judgments of effort and associated cues are influenced by stimulus context

The experience of cognitive effort is ubiquitous as well as influential; however, our understanding of how judgments of effort are influenced by contextual change is currently limited. Recent work has suggested that explicit cue reports immediately after provision of judgments of effort are sensitive to the evaluation context in which the judgment is made (Ashburner & Risko, 2022). We extend this research here by examining whether a “mixed” vs. “pure” stimulus context (i.e., experience with multiple stimulus types vs. a single stimulus type) would also influence judgments of effort. Furthermore, using explicit cue reports, we investigated whether the cues used to make these judgments were likewise influenced by the stimulus context. Results demonstrated that the pattern of effort judgments and the explicit cue reports changed markedly across stimulus context. Implications of these results in terms of better understanding how individuals make judgments of effort are discussed.