2023-2024 Psychology Department
Colloquium Speaker Series
presents
Laura Bustamante
Postdoctoral Fellow
Washington University in St. Louis
Computational Approaches to Individual Differences in Cognitive Control and Effort-based Decision Making
Cognitive control is foundational to positive life outcomes. Enhancing cognitive control to support individuals in achieving their goals has long been an objective in psychological research. This objective has remained elusive, with interventions typically targeting cognitive control ability. My research focuses on a promising alternative target for intervention; willingness to exert cognitive effort. I will present results from three studies using a novel individual differences measure of effort costs (i.e., avoidance). The Effort Foraging Task embedded cognitive or physical effort into a patch foraging sequential decision task, to isolate and quantify the cost of both cognitive and physical effort using a foraging theory computational model.
In the first study, we found that cognitive and physical effort costs were positively correlated in a large online sample, suggesting that these are perceived and processed in common terms. In the second study, surprisingly, we found that participants with greater overall symptoms of major depression were more willing to exert cognitive effort, but less willing to exert physical effort. In the third study we found that participants became more willing to exert cognitive effort under excitatory transcranial direct current stimulation to the frontopolar cortex, relative to sham. I will conclude with a discussion of the future directions for my laboratory, which aims to enhance cognitive control by targeting willingness to exert cognitive effort. My lab will accomplish this by investigating the computational and neural basis of inter-individual differences in cognitive control decision making, as well as intra-individual fluctuations in willingness to exert effort.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
3:30pm
301 Gilmer Hall