TY - JOUR T1 - An information-theoretic perspective on the costs of cognition JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/208280 SP - 208280 AU - ZĂ©non Alexandre AU - Solopchuk Oleg AU - Pezzulo Giovanni Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/25/208280.abstract N2 - Current theories of cognitive effort provide either resource-based or motivation-based accounts of its cost. Despite the usefulness of these proposals, it remains unclear how to exactly quantify effort costs - or why certain tasks are more effortful than others. Here, we provide a novel perspective, based on the assumption that the brain constructs a probabilistic internal model of the world under efficient coding principles. We propose that effort cost is a function of the amount of information required to update the internal model to effectively solve a task. This novel theory naturally explains why some tasks - for example, unfamiliar or dual tasks - are costly and permits to precisely quantify these costs using information-theoretic measures. Finally, we argue that information costs translate into local metabolic costs - which sheds light on the adaptive value of cost-avoidance mechanisms (cognitive effort) in preventing the accumulation of local metabolic alterations over time. ER -