Characterizing age-related change in learning the value of cognitive effort.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
= 150, ages 10-20 years) performance across two task-switching paradigms that manipulated the rewards offered for, and the difficulty of, engaging cognitive effort. In the primary experiment, reward cues were instructed but difficulty cues were learnable. In the secondary experiment, the reward and difficulty cues were both instructed, eliminating learning demands and effectively making the task easier. The primary experiment revealed that although less difficult contexts promoted greater accuracy at the group level, the regulation of cognitive effort according to higher and lower incentives emerged with age. Especially early in the task, older participants achieved greater accuracy for higher incentives. Younger participants, unexpectedly, achieved greater accuracy for lower incentives and adolescents performed similarly for each reward level. Nonetheless, participants of all ages self-reported trying their hardest for higher incentives, but only adults translated this aim into action. The secondary experiment revealed that in an overall easier task environment, cognitive effort did not become increasingly economical with age. Taken together, this pattern of findings suggests that different sources and amounts of information, and the conditions they are presented in, shape learning the value of cognitive effort from late childhood to early adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".