Neural systems of cognitive demand avoidance.

ABSTRACT: Cognitive effort is typically aversive, evident in people's tendency to avoid cognitively demanding tasks. The 'cost of control' hypothesis suggests that engagement of cognitive control systems of the brain makes a task costly and the currency of that cost is a reduction in anticipated rewards. However, prior studies have relied on binary hard versus easy task subtractions to manipulate cognitive effort and so have not tested this hypothesis in "dose-response" fashion. In a sample of 50 participants, we parametrically manipulated the level of effort during fMRI scanning by systematically increasing cognitive control demands during a demand-selection paradigm over six levels. As expected, frontoparietal control network (FPN) activity increased, and reward network activity decreased, as cont

SUBMITTER: Sayalı C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6317343 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature