Demand Avoidance in Value-Based Choice Under Risk: A Behavioral and Pupillometric Examination

Abstract

Why does decision-making sometimes feel demanding while other times feel effortless? Thedominant view of cognitive effort suggests that, else being equal, individuals prefer to avoidmentally effortful courses of action—an empirical phenomenon which has been well-studied incognitive control paradigms. However, less work has investigated cognitive demand avoidancein value-based decisions. Here we investigate subjective (self-reported) demand, preferences fordemand, and psychophysiological measures of effort outlay in the context of risky decision-making. Across three experiments (N=199), we observe that individuals evaluate choice pairs—consisting of two options with described risk levels and reward magnitudes—with lessdiscriminable expected value differences as subjectively more demanding. More interestingly,participants exhibit a robust preference for low-effort risky choice pairs in a novel DemandAvoidance Task, which we modeled after well-characterized effort preference paradigms used inthe cognitive control domain. Finally, using pupillometry, we find that participants, contrary toour expectations, exhibit larger task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs)—a well-characterizedmeasure of momentary effort exertion—when choosing between low-demand risky choice pairs,and that these TEPR magnitudes predicted demand-avoidant preferences in a subsequent testphase. Together, these results demonstrate that cognitive demand avoidance generalizes beyondcognitive control tasks to risky value-based choice.

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