After spending a long morning grading exams, it's natural to feel drained and in need of a break. While relaxing might be the obvious choice, you may look for small rewards to lift your spirits, like enjoying a chocolate bar or scrolling through social media for a few minutes.
Research indicates that intense cognitive effort can lead to mental fatigue, which may drive unhealthy behaviors like overeating or substance abuse. This phenomenon is often attributed to a decline in cognitive control. However, it may be linked to the increased sensitivity to reward, making them relaxed after engaging in demanding mental tasks.
Both rats and humans who engaged in cognitive tasks demonstrated a stronger desire for rewards, with rats self-administering more cocaine and humans rating snacks as tastier. Cognitive fatigue doesn't just weaken willpower, it intensifies the cravings for rewards. This insight could be valuable for understanding and managing addiction and unhealthy behaviors.
Marcello Solinas and colleagues explore the possibility that cognitive effort may also make unhealthy choices. Rats who completed a cognitively demanding task self-administered more cocaine than rats who did not complete the cognitively demanding task, or rats who were allowed to rest for 2-4 hours after completion of the complex task. This suggests that cognitive fatigue may lead to increased drug-seeking behavior.
Similarly, humans who were tasked with suppressing thoughts of a 'white bear' while listing other thoughts consumed more potato chips and rated them as tastier than those who did not engage in effortful tasks.
This indicates that cognitive efforts heightened the hedonic experience associated with snacking on salty and fatty foods.
Individuals who are on a diet or are recovering from addiction often report relapses during times of stress and mental fatigue. Multiple factors contribute to this phenomenon, such as beliefs regarding the stress-relieving properties of the drugs, or the inability to resist the temptations.
It is called as 'depletion' period, when after engaging in demanding self-control tasks revolves around motivation. After significant effort in one task, individuals are not motivated to exert more effort and gravitate to the immediate temptations.
Overall these findings imply that mental fatigue can intensify the allure of unhealthy rewards, highlighting a crucial factor in decision-making related to food and substance use.
To determine the cognitive efforts lead to extreme judgments a follow-up study was conducted using a difficult and easy writing task. The results showed that the rating of chocolate increased after completing the demanding task, but the rating of neutral items, like the length of the pen or brightness of the yellow post remained unchanged.
This distinction suggests that the effect of cognitive effort on perceived desirability is specific to rewarding stimuli, rather than a generalized tendency to make extreme judgments. The authors propose that this heightened sensitivity to rewards might not just be a byproduct of evolution, but could also serve an adaptive purpose in certain contexts.
Engaging in cognitive effort, individuals are more likely to gamble, smoke, and, prefer immediate rewards.
These findings have important implications for managing addiction and unhealthy behaviors, as they spark how cognitive efforts can attract rewards, potentially sometimes leading to poor decision-making.
(Input from multiple sources)
(Rehash/Josna Lewis/MSM)