Devine Sean, Dong Y Doug, Silva Martin Sellier, Roy Mathieu, Otto A Ross
Department of Psychology, McGill University, 2001 Av. McGill College, Montréal, QC, H3A 1G1, Canada.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Jan 13. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02636-8.
A growing body of evidence across psychology suggests that (cognitive) effort exertion increases in proximity to a goal state. For instance, previous work has shown that participants respond more quickly, but not less accurately, when they near a goal-as indicated by a filling progress bar. Yet it remains unclear when over the course of a cognitively demanding task do people monitor progress information: Do they continuously monitor their goal progress over the course of a task, or attend more frequently to it as they near their goal? To answer this question, we used eye-tracking to examine trial-by-trial changes in progress monitoring as participants completed blocks of an attentionally demanding oddball task. Replicating past work, we found that participants increased cognitive effort exertion near a goal, as evinced by an increase in correct responses per second. More interestingly, we found that the rate at which participants attended to goal progress information-operationalized here as the frequency of gazes towards a progress bar-increased steeply near a goal state. In other words, participants extracted information from the progress bar at a higher rate when goals were proximal (versus distal). In exploratory analysis of tonic pupil diameter, we also found that tonic pupil size increased sharply as participants approached a goal state, mirroring the pattern of gaze. These results support the view that people attend to progress information more as they approach a goal.
心理学领域越来越多的证据表明，（认知）努力程度会随着接近目标状态而增加。例如，先前的研究表明，当参与者接近目标时（如进度条的填充所示），他们的反应会更快，但准确性不会降低。然而，在一项需要认知的任务过程中，人们何时监测进度信息仍不清楚：他们是在任务过程中持续监测目标进度，还是在接近目标时更频繁地关注它？为了回答这个问题，我们使用眼动追踪技术，在参与者完成一系列需要注意力的oddball任务时，逐次试验地检查进度监测的变化。重复过去的研究，我们发现参与者在接近目标时增加了认知努力程度，这表现为每秒正确反应次数的增加。更有趣的是，我们发现参与者关注目标进度信息的速率——在这里通过注视进度条的频率来衡量——在接近目标状态时急剧增加。换句话说，当目标接近（相对于遥远）时，参与者从进度条中提取信息的速率更高。在对静息瞳孔直径的探索性分析中，我们还发现，随着参与者接近目标状态，静息瞳孔大小急剧增加，这与注视模式一致。这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即人们在接近目标时会更多地关注进度信息。
