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Handbook of Biobehavioral Approaches to Self-Regulation pp 237–253Cite as

Mental Effort: Brain and Autonomic Correlates in Health and Disease

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Abstract

Mental effort is an embodied process for the short-term deployment of attentional, cognitive and affective resources. The engagement of mental effort involves whole brain shifts in the activation and functional connectivity of sensory and integrative brain regions. Concurrent changes in bodily internal physiology are mediated by cortically driven modulation of subcortical and brainstem homeostatic centres. Within the brain, there is typically engagement of components of the salience network including (sympathetic visceromotor) dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and (viscerosensory) bilateral insula cortex. There is also commonly a disengagement of the default mode network (‘antisympathetic’ ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate/precuneus) regions. The bidirectional impact of these changes on bodily states of preparedness is mediated neurally via midbrain and brainstem centres. The accompanying state of autonomic arousal is proposed to facilitate goal-directed cognitive processes and underpin feelings of perceived difficulty, control and achievement. Mental effort also elicits more task-specific involvement of executive frontoparietal centres and sensory cortices, while the achievability and control of sustained effort feeds back into affective circuitry. Clinical disorders of effort accompany inflammation-induced stereotyped sickness responses and span developmental, ‘functional’ and degenerative psychiatric diagnostic boundaries. Fatigue states, inattentiveness and diminished motivational drive suggest discrete dimensions through which effort is compromised. Mental effort is ultimately tied to top-down predictions and the value associated with active more precise inferences about future behavioural outcomes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Eugenia Radulescu MD, PhD & Hugo Critchley PhD

  2. Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Universities of Brighton and Sussex, East Sussex BN1 9RR, Brighton, UK

    Eugenia Radulescu MD, PhD, Yoko Nagai PhD & Hugo Critchley PhD

  3. Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Baltimore, USA

    Eugenia Radulescu MD, PhD

Authors
  1. Eugenia Radulescu MD, PhD
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  2. Yoko Nagai PhD
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  3. Hugo Critchley PhD
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hugo Critchley PhD .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geneva Motivation Lab, FPSE Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Geneve, Switzerland

    Guido H.E. Gendolla

  2. Department of Clinical Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Mattie Tops

  3. Department of Clinical Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Sander L. Koole

Conclusions

Conclusions

Neuroscientific studies of mental effort focus on descriptions of its affective and cognitive components, and the phsyiological correlates in bodily state (both as an objective index and as an account of the feeling state itself). Knowledge gained from neuroimaging and related techniques broadly endorse the notion that effort represents more than the allocation of attentional and information processing resources for enhanced task performance. In this context, effort has intrinsic value, visceral salience and its own sensory representation. Its dependent relationship to motivational drive is important for attaining immediate task goals, yet also weights future investment into effortful behaviour and adjusts the value of future outcomes. The experience of effort mirrors that of other feeling states including agency, achievement and emotion . Increasingly, predictive coding models are providing robust accounts of how the brain handles perception, experience and behaviour. There is an emphasis on the primacy of higher-order representations of external and internal environments, which in turn are tested against a stream of changing sensory data, including internal bodily signals (Friston and Keibel 2009; Seth et al. 2011; Seth and Critchley 2013; Seth 2013; Fig. 16.2). In this context, mental effort has a relationship to the notion of active inference, whereby sensory predictions are validated through the consequences of self-initiated behaviour. For effort, this includes the generation of internal bodily arousal states. The application of mental effort can thus be used to gauge the investment value of types of cognitive work and to tune both general and specific cognitive processes in anticipation of informational demand. The physiological embodiment of effort grounds its cognitive impact in action tendencies and motivational states. The enhanced understanding of mental effort and its underlying neurobiology has direct relevance to the expression of clinical symptoms across a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders including chronic fatigue, brain trauma, depression, Parkinson’s disease, ADHD and schizophrenia.

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Radulescu, E., Nagai, Y., Critchley, H. (2015). Mental Effort: Brain and Autonomic Correlates in Health and Disease. In: Gendolla, G., Tops, M., Koole, S. (eds) Handbook of Biobehavioral Approaches to Self-Regulation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1236-0_16

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