Cognitive effort in context

Rapidly and flexibly adapting to conflicting situations is crucial for almost all of our daily activity. When we encounter conflict, we need to exert cognitive effort to overcome it. The state of the art so far has overlooked that we do this in a complex context. This calls for an in-depth exploration of how effort exertion behaves in context. The overarching goal of this project is therefore to study task-related, dynamic, social and developmental aspects of human effort exertion. Furthermore, if cognitive effort fluctuates with these contextual aspects, automatically we have to wonder whether and how we can shape the context in order to stimulate cognitive effort. In order to reach these objectives we will integrate behavioural and psychophysiological methods (fMRI, EEG, pupillometry). These objectives will lead to a range of ground-breaking theoretical and applied advancements. Together, they will lead to a new contextual view on effort. Ultimately, this project aims to be the frontrunner in introducing in-context theory, where constructs and processes are approached from a broader perspective, bringing us closer to how they actually behave in real-life.

Keywords:cognitive effort

Disciplines:Education curriculum, Education systems, General pedagogical and educational sciences, Specialist studies in education, Other pedagogical and educational sciences, Biological and physiological psychology, General psychology, Other psychology and cognitive sciences