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The Temporal Dynamics of Opportunity Costs: A Normative Account of Cognitive Fatigue and Boredom

View ORCID ProfileMayank Agrawal, Marcelo G. Mattar, Jonathan D. Cohen, Nathaniel D. Daw
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.08.287276
Mayank Agrawal
1Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University
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  • For correspondence: mayank.agrawal@princeton.edu
Marcelo G. Mattar
2Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego
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Jonathan D. Cohen
1Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University
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Nathaniel D. Daw
1Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University
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Abstract

Cognitive fatigue and boredom are two phenomenological states widely associated with limitations in cognitive control. In this paper, we present a rational analysis of the temporal structure of controlled behavior, which provides a new framework for providing a formal account of these phenomena. We suggest that in controlling behavior, the brain faces competing behavioral and computational imperatives, and must balance them by tracking their opportunity costs over time. We use this analysis to flesh out previous suggestions that feelings associated with subjective effort, like cognitive fatigue and boredom, are the phenomenological counterparts of these opportunity cost measures, rather then reflecting the depletion of resources as has often been assumed. Specifically, we propose that both fatigue and boredom reflect the competing value of particular options that require foregoing immediate reward but can improve future performance: Fatigue reflects the value of offline computation (internal to the organism) to improve future decisions, while boredom signals the value of exploratory actions (external in the world) to gather information. We demonstrate that these accounts provide a mechanistically explicit and parsimonious account for a wide array of findings related to cognitive control, integrating and reimagining them under a single, formally rigorous framework.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 09, 2020.
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The Temporal Dynamics of Opportunity Costs: A Normative Account of Cognitive Fatigue and Boredom
Mayank Agrawal, Marcelo G. Mattar, Jonathan D. Cohen, Nathaniel D. Daw
bioRxiv 2020.09.08.287276; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.08.287276
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The Temporal Dynamics of Opportunity Costs: A Normative Account of Cognitive Fatigue and Boredom
Mayank Agrawal, Marcelo G. Mattar, Jonathan D. Cohen, Nathaniel D. Daw
bioRxiv 2020.09.08.287276; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.08.287276

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