Phaneuf-Hadd Camille V, Jacques Isabelle M, Insel Catherine, Otto A Ross, Somerville Leah H
Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2025 Jun;154(6):1667-1680. doi: 10.1037/xge0001745. Epub 2025 Mar 27.
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 = 150, secondary experiment = 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).
当一项任务的奖励收益超过其难度成本时，他们会“努力思考”。然而，儿童和青少年是否以及如何根据关于其价值的多种线索来调整他们的认知努力，仍有待观察，包括在这些线索必须通过经验来学习的新环境中。鉴于激励和需求信息的处理会随着年龄而变化，本研究考察了参与者（主要实验 = 150人，次要实验 = 150人，年龄在10 - 20岁之间）在两种任务切换范式中的表现，这两种范式操纵了为投入认知努力所提供的奖励以及难度。在主要实验中，奖励线索是明确告知的，但难度线索是可学习的。在次要实验中，奖励和难度线索都是明确告知的，消除了学习要求并有效地使任务变得更容易。主要实验表明，虽然难度较低的情境在群体层面上促进了更高的准确性，但根据高低不同的激励来调节认知努力是随着年龄出现的。特别是在任务早期，年龄较大的参与者在高激励下取得了更高的准确性。出乎意料的是，年龄较小的参与者在低激励下取得了更高的准确性，而青少年在每个奖励水平下的表现相似。尽管如此，所有年龄段的参与者都自我报告说为了高激励会尽最大努力，但只有成年人将这一目标转化为了行动。次要实验表明，在总体更容易的任务环境中，认知努力并没有随着年龄的增长而变得越来越经济。综合来看，这种研究结果模式表明，不同的信息来源和数量，以及它们呈现的条件，塑造了从童年晚期到成年早期对认知努力价值的学习。（PsycInfo数据库记录 (c) 2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
