Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive control is critical for accomplishing daily tasks andyet we experience it as effortful or costly. Researchers havebeen increasingly interested in estimating how costly cognitivecontrol is for a given individual, to better understand underly-ing mechanisms and predict motivational impairments outsidethe lab. Here we leverage a computational model of controlallocation to (a) demonstrate a procedure for estimating indi-vidual’s control costs from task performance and (b) highlightthe conditions under which estimated costs will be confoundedwith other motivational variables. We show that costs of cog-nitive control can be reliably estimated under perfect assump-tions about other motivational variables. However, our simu-lation results indicate that poorly calibrated estimates of thoseother variables can lead to potentially drastic misestimations ofsubjects’ control costs, compromising the validity of empiricalobservations. We conclude by discussing the implications ofthese analyses for assessing individual differences in the costsof cognitive control.