Authors:

Kyle Aspillera

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About Paper:

People often prefer less demanding tasks over more rewarding but cognitively demanding ones, a phenomenon known as effort discounting. Effort discounting reflects the tendency to devalue rewards as required cognitive effort increases. Although individual differences in effort discounting are well-documented, it remains unclear how they relate to clinically relevant phenomena such as ADHD symptom severity, depression, and anxiety. Here, we examine whether self-reported psychopathology predicts cognitive effort discounting in a large online sample. We collected data from N = 674 individuals (mean age = 25, 361 females) who completed the Cognitive Effort Discounting (CogED) task, in which participants choose between completing varying levels of n-back working memory demand for different monetary rewards. Overall, participants showed a clear preference for lower-effort options, accepting lower monetary rewards to avoid higher cognitive loads. Individual differences in effort discounting were quantified using area under the curve (AUC), where higher values reflect reduced discounting and lower values indicate steeper devaluation under increasing cognitive demand. Participants also completed the Conners' Adult ADHD Rating Scale (CAARS), the PHQ-9, and the GAD-7. Contrary to expectation, AUC showed no significant correlation with ADHD symptoms (r = 0.000, p = 0.998), depression (r = -0.018, p = 0.643), or anxiety (r = -0.023, p = 0.559). However, demographic variables predicted both psychopathology and AUC. Females reported higher symptoms across all three measures (all p < 0.001) and lower AUC than males (p = 0.007). Higher education and income were associated with lower psychopathology (all p < 0.001), and income was a small but significant predictor of AUC (r = 0.085, p = 0.028). These findings suggest cognitive effort discounting is largely independent of self-reported psychopathology, and contribute to a growing literature on motivational and cognitive mechanisms underlying ADHD and related conditions.

Source:

Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium

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Co-authors:

Kyle Aspillera