Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The empirical measurement of mental effort is an important problem in the cognitive sciences. Recently, researchers have adopted econometric tools to attempt to characterize mental effort in terms of monetary costs foregone. Such efforts yield a very helpful calculation device - a money utility of mental effort. However, since the opportunity cost of applying mental effort in any given situation is measured with respect to time rather than money in most ecologically reasonable settings, it is even more desirable to obtain a measure of the time utility of mental effort. In the absence of direct measurements of men- tal effort, such a task has proved econometrically challenging. We use a recently developed direct measure of mental effort to characterize its time utility, finding that it is approximately linear in effort. We discuss some implications of this result for current theories of mental effort, as well as for practical applications.