Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When given the chance to choose between two tasks, one willmore likely choose the easier, less demanding task. Thiseffect has been shown in various domains and referred to asthe law of minimum effort or demand avoidance. Themeasure of demand avoidance that is currently used is theproportion of low-demand choices. We show that the currentmeasure is not appropriate for accurately assessing individualdifferences in demand avoidance, because the process ofdemand selection is contingent upon the process of demanddetection. Subsequently, we suggest a new measure ofdemand avoidance that combines demand detection anddemand selection. We show that the new measure of demandavoidance correlates in the expected direction (i.e.,negatively) with established measures of willingness andability to carry out cognitively demanding tasks. We proposea novel, performance-based measure of cognitive effortavoidance that can be used to enhance the validity of researchin cognition, perception, and neurosciences.