Browsing by Author "Ashburner, Michelle"

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How hard was that? Context effects on judgments of effort
(University of Waterloo, 2025-01-03) Ashburner, Michelle; Risko, Evan F
How do individuals make judgments of effort? Despite cognitive effort being a central construct in scholarship, as well as an influential concept in day-to-day life, we have a limited understanding of how individuals determine the effort associated with cognitive acts. Recent work has demonstrated that judgments of effort can be influenced by the context in which they are made (i.e., the judgment context). I employed a reading task and stimulus set that has produced a reliable dissociation between judgments of effort and cognitive demand to further investigate contextual influences on effort judgments. Specifically, I manipulated the context (i.e., the evaluation context) in which individuals read and judged the stimuli; collected individuals’ reasons for their effort judgments; and measured objective demand (i.e., reading times, error counts). In Experiments 1-4, I determined that this context manipulation did not seem to eliminate the dissociation between judgments of effort and objective demand; however, I revealed that evaluation context has a robust effect on judgments of effort. Furthermore, individuals’ reasons varied just as markedly across evaluation contexts. In Experiments 5-7, I extended this work by manipulating the context in which individuals read the stimuli (i.e., the stimulus context) while holding the judgment context constant. Individuals’ reasons for judgment suggested that the cues used to make effort judgments are influenced by the stimulus context, with both judgments and reasons exhibiting notable changes across stimulus contexts. Implications of these results, including how they guide our understanding of the effort judgment process, are discussed.
On the influence of evaluation context on judgments of effort.
(American Psychology Association, 2022) Ashburner, Michelle; Risko, Evan F.
Cognitive effort is a central construct in our lives, yet our understanding of the processes underlying our judgments of effort are limited. Recent work has suggested that our judgments of effort are sensitive to the context in which they are made (i.e., the judgment context). Using a cognitive task and stimulus set that has produced a reliable dissociation between judgments of effort and cognitive demand (as measured by performance and other indirect measures of demand), we examined whether evaluation context might be able to eliminate this dissociation (i.e., bring judgments of effort more in line with measures of cognitive demand). To address this question, we conducted four experiments manipulating a number of aspects of the judgment context including, principally, a manipulation of joint vs. separate evaluation; whether the judgment was prospective, or retrospective; and whether prospective judgments were made with or without having experienced the cognitive task. Additionally, we collected objective demand measures and examined participants’ self-reported reasons for their judgments of effort across the joint and separate evaluation contexts. Results demonstrated that evaluation context has a marked effect on judgments of effort; however, no judgment context appeared to yield a pattern more similar to what is found using measures of cognitive demand. Moreover, the reasons individuals cited for their judgments varied across evaluation contexts. Implications of the present work for our understanding of judgments of effort are discussed.